On 2/22/2015 2:52 PM, LizR wrote:
On 23 February 2015 at 10:17, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
Computationalism is an extraordinary claim.
The claim that what goes on inside brains is at some level Turing-emulable seems not
necessarily extraordinary - or do you think it is?
Yes. It's not crazy or outlandish, but I don't think it's ordinary either.
It seems like a fairly standard assumption by many scientists and philosophers, but I
can believe it's wrong - but some reason to do so would be nice rather, than just a
"statement from authority". as given here.Y
(If the conclusions Bruno has drawn from that assumption appear extraordinary those
aren't "claims", just deductions which can presumably be shown to be wrong through the
application of logic, assuming they are ub fact wrong. He's provided a detailed
description of his assumptions and deductions, so go to it.)
I doubt Bruno has made an error of deduction. But I find his interpretation that
identifies "provable" = "belief" dubious. And even the Plationist idea that arithmetic
exists in the sense necessary to instantiate the world we see is doubtful.
That some things may happen at random isn't.
Now that /is/ an extraordinary claim, in my opinion. What would be a suitable underlying
means by which the universe might operate, that it makes things happen at random? I can
imagine things that might appear random to us, but are actually the result of
deterministic forces operating on scales we can't probe - e.g. string vibrations. But
genuinely random - that seems to me to require extraordinary evidence. So far we only
have evidence for "apparently random" as far as I know.
Some backup for the above two extraordinary claims would be welcome.
(1) that brains aren't Turing emulable at any level
You seem to be saying that to assert a claim is extraordinary is equivalent to asserting
it's negation. So if I say claiming there's a teapot orbiting Jupiter is extraordinary,
you'll ask that I back up that extraordinary assertion? What happened to agnosticism? I
don't think I made any extraordinary claim; unless mere doubt of Platonism has become
extraordinary.
(2) that there is a mechanism by which the universe might generate truly, rather than
apparently random events.
I'm not sure it's possible to have a mechanism that generates truly random events. I
think that's like asking for an algorithm that produces truly random numbers. - although
it may turn on the meaning of "mechanism".
Brent
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