On 7 November 2014 01:33, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> wrote:
> (Apologies for the belated reply) > > Could you explain this further? Compare a brain with a car. Is a car > diminished in some way in the absence of an appreciative observer but > a brain not, or is it that the brain creates its own observer? If the > latter, is that a problem? And how do you know that a car does not > also in some ineffable way (because we're not cars, and can't > appreciate even what this would mean) observe itself? Would it be > right to say that the car's quasi-experience or lack of it is (a) > meaningless because not externally observable, (b) wrong because not > externally observable, (c) possible but unknowable, (d) trivial > because equivalent to the assertion that the system is different from > its parts? > Better late than never! What I meant was that a putative "system", according to strict reductive principles, can only be "more" than the sum of its ontological components (and their interactions) in terms of some point of view or other. Indeed the whole point and burden of reductionism is precisely to uncover some "base mechanism" that requires nothing "more" than that. The only problem with this is that, when "objectively" considering ontological composites, a default point of view (the view from nowhere, or god's eye view) still tends to be tacitly assumed. In this way we can conveniently regard a car (an ontological composite), even in the absence of any other explicit observer, as being categorically distinguishable from the assumed ontological basis. But what tends to be forgotten is that the category in question is epistemological, not ontological. Now, if we have some principled reason to regard a "system" as self-interpreting, or self-observing, it may be understood as particularising itself, epistemologically, from whatever (generalised) ontology is assumed. In turn, this seems to justify, retrospectively, some sort of (epistemological) realism about the composite entity responsible for the interpretation. Admittedly, this does seem peculiarly circular, but I'm rather forced to the view that this is a virtuous, rather than vicious, feature. It certainly seems to follow necessarily from comp. 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
