On 7 July 2014 20:13, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > So no, there's no "heresy" involved in such an idea > unless, IMHO, it is a blind for eliminativism. > > > Why? Is eliminativism then the heresy? I'm not even sure what > 'eliminativism' means in this context. You seem to argue that reductive > hierarchy in physics eliminates the explananda, but in Bruno's theory the > reductive hierarchy does not? I don't think anything is necessarily > eliminated by explaining it.
But the unfortunate thing is that it is indeed eliminated when it is explained reductively. And so you might well say that elimination is the reductionist heresy. I'd be grateful, by the way, if you could be more explicit about your reasons for disagreement than merely stating that you "don't think" I'm right. When I'm wrong (which is doubtless all too frequently) it would be helpful to know in what particulars. Anyway, what I originally had in mind was limited to the tacit elimination of the first-person that occurs in the exhaustive reduction of 'consciousness' to physical action. But actually, in the course of this discussion, It's borne in on me, with greater force than before, that it isn't only the first-person that is eliminated in the course of reductive explanation, but the entire third-person hierarchy above the basement level. No explanandum of the "hierarchy" can be other than a proxy for its basement-level reduction, in essentially the same sense that "society" is a proxy for persons and their relations. So there must be something "wrong in the state of reductionism", at least in this "bare" form. And if Bruno's theory were indeed similarly susceptible to bare reduction, the same criticism would apply. Reductive explanation is like some flesh-eating microbe - it eats away the structure as it reduces it, until nothing but the bare explanatory bones remain. That indeed is its power. But, in this bare form it can't stand alone as a theory of everything, because manifestly everything does not appear in the form of a bare reduction. So we need an explanatory "vaccine" against the microbe of reduction. I've already said why I believe that Bruno's theory does indeed provide such a vaccine, essentially by (partly) formalising the relation between the One and the Many. The One, which I guess is represented here by Arithmetical Truth, has many modes. These modes can be distinguished (in part) by reference to detailed character of what appears in the many points-of-view that are consequential on the self-referential capabilities of "universal computation". The fact that the latter requires us to assume arithmetic, or something with equivalent combinatorial power, as a minimal "ontology", does not mean that the explanatory strategy then proceeds by reference to any simple "hierarchy of numbers". Of course it is crucial to the success of this explanatory strategy that a 'physics' emerge as statistically dominant in these views (indeed, precisely that subset of the computational 'everything' that is capable of instantiating the manifest phenomena) and *that physics* will indeed appear as hierarchically reducible. But such a physics of appearance will in addition be inextricably bound to modes of self-referential truth that resist such reduction (the 'internal views'). None of this means that comp per se is true of course, but I suspect this whole "comp contra reduction" thing is worthy of a thread by itself. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
