On 11/7/2014 5:43 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 7 November 2014 01:33, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]
<mailto:[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,
Are not the relations between the subsystems part of the ontology?
Brent
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
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