On 09 Nov 2014, at 13:04, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Sunday, November 9, 2014, David Nyman <[email protected]> wrote:
On 8 November 2014 07:54, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
Are not the relations between the subsystems part of the ontology?
Explicitly so in arithmetical realism, I would say.
Not really. Perhaps I could respond both to you and Brent in one
here. I'm trying to make an explicit distinction between an assumed
ontology and its (possible) epistemological consequences. In comp,
the assumed ontology is restricted to basic arithmetical relations;
physics likewise is a search for a fundamental level of explanation
in terms of which everything else can explicitly (at least in
principle) be rendered. Of course, one can speak in terms of systems
and sub-systems composed of such basic entities and relations. But
it is surely a guiding principle of reductive explanation that such
composites, and the relations between them, must ultimately be
exhaustively accountable in terms of the fundamental ontological
assumptions. If that were not the case, the attempted "reduction"
would merely have been unsuccessful.
Indeed it is only in terms of some explicit point of view that we
are ever forced to contemplate a strong form of emergence, or
"realism", about any level of composition over and above the
reductive base. Strictly speaking, composite systems and relations
are *epistemologically* real, rather than ontologically so, in any
strong sense. In fact so-called "weak emergence" isn't really
emergence at all as, objectively speaking, nothing is to be
conceived as being "there" over and above the basic entities and
their relations.
OK so far, I think. I confess I find your idea-laden sentences
difficult at times.
So my point is that it is simply self-defeating to deny that there
is in fact any such thing as epistemological realism, as Graziano
explicitly does. In attempting to do so, he simply cuts the ground
from under his own claim.
On my reading, Graziano agrees with what you said above about weak
emergence, and claims that therefore consciousness does not exist.
But that's just a manner of speaking.
A very dangerous manner of speaking. It just makes no sense at all. It
put the interesting problem under the rug. It cannot take into account
the dicovery that *any* universal machine looking inward discover the
gap between truth and proofs, the gap between observable and physical
but non-observable, etc. this is a form of solipsisme eventually. He
missed that we have to explain the physical laws from the
consciousness/first-person invariance for recursive permutations. he
missed that we have to extend Everett's embedding of the physicists in
the physical to the embedding of the mathematician in arithmetic
(begun by Gödel and Co.).
Bruno
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Stathis Papaioannou
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