On 8 November 2014 07:26, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 11/7/2014 5:43 AM, David Nyman wrote: > > 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, > > Are not the relations between the subsystems part of the ontology? >
Explicitly so in arithmetical realism, I would say. -- 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.
