On 11/9/2014 4:58 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 9 November 2014 23:16, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
One could say that if the bill of materials includes the ingredients
and laws governing the interactions between the ingredients, that's
everything there is. If seemingly magical things, fairies and unicorns
and conscious beings, come out of the mix that doesn't necessarily
mean that the ontological assumptions are deficient, but it may mean
(by elimination) that the beholder's cognitive capacity is limited.
AFAICT, the second sentence above stands in direct contradiction to the first. If
Graziano *really means to say* that the bill of materials is restricted in the way you
suggest - IOW, that it is truly "everything there is" - then he cannot consistently
*additionally believe* in either beholders or their cognitive capacities. But that
conclusion would of course be both absurd and is indeed directly contradicted by what he
actually goes on to say. Therefore I am forced to conclude that he is simply being
inconsistent in his supposed commitment to any such restricted bill of materials because
it is obvious that he openly relies on an indefinite variety of supernumerary entities
and relations that are neither entailed nor required by it.
The only really *consistent* view, under Graziano's presumably physicalist assumptions,
would be the elimination of all references to persons, beliefs, cognitive abilities or
indeed anything over and above the (assumed) fundamental entities and relations of
physics. Under his assumptions, nothing whatsoever over and above this fundamental bill
of materials is presumed necessary to account for the indefinite evolution of any
physical state of affairs, which (lest we forget) is "all there is". What then is the
motivation to speak of persons, cognitive abilities or any other such physically
redundant conceits? Things are presumed to evolve, in precisely the way they should,
without the aid of any such supplementary notions, are they not?
Graziano aim is to single out "consciousness" for special attention, but the
uncomfortable fact is that this particular razor has a very much more radical scope. It
carries on slicing until the very conceptual structures he seeks to spare, and on which
he continues to rely, lie in tatters. But then, a conclusion as radical as *that*
wouldn't leave him with very much more to say, would it? Even more problematically, it
wouldn't leave *him* at all.
But your radical ontological commitment seems to have the same kind of problem. It would
imply that number theorists cannot really refer to Mersenne primes or Goldbach's
conjecture. The must speak only of strings of S, (0), +, *, and ->. You seem to forbid
naming any structure or making any assertions or inferences about them on pain of being
"inconsistent".
Brent
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