On 10 Nov 2014, at 09:15, meekerdb wrote:
On 11/9/2014 4:58 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 9 November 2014 23:16, Stathis Papaioannou <[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.
So I agree with this, but I am not sure if this answers David. Number
theorists can talk on Mersenne primes, and even on provability
predicate (machine rational beliefs). But the number theorists and the
physicists usually are not interested in consciousness, which come up
by a different type of emergence: the intensional variants of Gödel's
provability predicate (like []p & p, []p & <>p & p, etc.). They put a
different structure on arithmetic, and indeed physics should come from
some of those structure. They involved also the notion of God, or
Truth, which cannot be named or defined in the theory. Those
interested in cognition cannot avoid such emerging reality, even if it
is 3p-invisible, a bit like the parallel realities in QM.
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".
No, they can nales anything they can define in arithmetic. Even if it
is not in the ontology, it is refers still to provable relation among
what exists. Not so for the epistemological reality, which can be
harnessed only by going at the meta-level, with other axioms, and in
our case with undecidable truth like the invariance of consciousness
for substitution at some level.
Bruno
Brent
--
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.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
