On 2/5/2015 5:57 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 6 February 2015 at 01:01, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
You seem intent on defining terms in order to dimiss them. For example,
why is
taking "mental" to be re-description of the physical "elimininativism"?
Does it
eliminate the physical or the mental - or neither. If I describe heat as
the
average energy per degree of freedom do you think I've eliminated heat?
I'm sorry, but you don't seem to accept the generally understood sense of eliminativism
here. We're not talking about the validity of one or another re-description, or
mathematical model. In purely third-person terms, of course, one model can be as valid
or useful as another, depending on the purpose for which it is deployed. But what is at
issue here is first-person reality, actuality or truth. which cannot be similarly
negotiated away in purely third-person terms.
Right. Any description/model/explanation is going to be in 3rd person terms. I'm not
sure what you think is 1st person. You use reality, actuality, truth (and the American
way?), but why should those be attributed to 1st person experience. It's often mistaken
about reality and truth is a property of propositions - not experiences.
If that reality is defined in its entirety as an alternative mathematical model imposed
on a primary ontology, it becomes *eliminable*, in the sense of being functionally
replaceable by some alternative re-description.
And vice-versa. If you can replace X with Y that doesn't mean you can't
replace Y with X.
This principle is perfectly obvious in terms of any reductive hierarchy,
And here you insert the idea of hierarchy and reduction - which I suspect is because you
don't like reductionism. But any explanation/model has to be in terms of parts and
relations we can comprehend and so they will be reductionist in some sense - and they will
also be synthesist in the opposite sense that the reductionist elements combine to
instantiate the phenomenon.
for example in the case you quote above.
But it is not perfectly obvious that replacing model X with model Y has
destroyed/dismissed/eliminated X.
You seem to have a reflex so that any mention of something physical
triggers a
response that the mental is being denied, eliminated, and not properly
honored and
that someone is claiming "everything is just physical" - even though it's
been noted
that "physical" is not very well defined.
I'd like you to understand that I'm not saying that 'someone is claiming' any such thing
explicitly (although they might be). Rather I'm trying to make explicit the implicit
concealment of such a claim in the use of particular assumptions and derivations.
So you're saying that are thoughtlessly implying that "everything is just physical"
without knowing what they're saying. And I'm saying I have thought about it and you're wrong.
Essentially the question seems to boil down, "Can there be an account of
sequences
of thoughts that can be shared?" We all know there are explanations in
terms of
prior ideas, memories, desires. Why should there not also be explanations
of the
same thing in terms of neurons, hormones, and senses?
I think you're caricaturing my position. But to answer your question, of course there
can be neurological explanations, but they' won't *in themselves* be mental
explanations, although they can (hopefully) be associated with them and in that sense
shared. I think the nub of our dispute is that I'm dissatisfied with leaving it at that.
Your response is generally to tell me not to expect explanation to be capable of taking
any other form or going any further. ISTM that Bruno's ideas, regardless of whether they
ultimately pan out, indicate that this isn't necessarily the case.
Bruno reduces both the physical and the mental to computation. He thinks he has
reconstructed the mental, at least the cognitive part, but it remains to synthesize the
physical.
Brent
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