On Tuesday, March 10, 2015, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 5:24 PM, John Clark <[email protected] > <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[email protected]');>> wrote: > >> On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 Telmo Menezes <[email protected] >> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[email protected]');>> wrote: >> >> >> I never said one word about matter being fundamental, in fact I think >>>> if anything is fundamental it's consciousness not matter; however I did say >>>> that a non-materialistic theory is not falsifiable and you said I was >>>> confused. So cure my confusion by giving me a EXAMPLE (not a loquacious >>>> definition that is so general it's useless) of a non-materialistic theory >>>> that is falsifiable. >>>> >>> >>> > Darwinism and general relativity are two examples amongst many of >>> scientific theories that are falsifiable but do not assume materialism. >>> >> >> What on earth are you talking about?! Darwin theorized that systems that >> are made out of MATERIAL that have the capacity to duplicate themselves >> sometimes don't do so perfectly and sometimes those changes enable the >> MATERIAL system to reproduce faster in a given MATERIAL environment than if >> the copying had been perfect. And General Relativity makes very very >> precise predictions of how the trajectory of light and any other MATERIAL >> thing will change when it passes near a large MATERIAL object. How are >> these supposed to be non-materialistic theories? >> > > Non-materialism is not the denial of matter, it just places it as an > epiphenomenon. Darwinism is a computer science theory. It works on DNA but > it also works on solutions to the travelling salesman problem. The problem > of weather matter is epiphenomenal or a brute fact is incidental to how DNA > encodes information, how phenotypes are expressed from it and so on. > > If we are living in the dream of a giant turtle, then general relativity > is a valid theory about the rules inside this dream. The fundamental nature > of the observations it predicts is irrelevant to the validity of the theory. > > This is, however, not true of the hypothesis that consciousness is an > epiphenomena of matter. That is a materialist theory, and it's also peepee > (not falsifiability, no explanatory power, no ability to predict anything). > The way I look at it, we start assuming a material universe (because that's what it looks like). Then we observe that brains generate consciousness. Then we deduce that a computer can also think and generate consciousness. Then we note in passing that consciousness does not act on matter and call it an epiphenomenon or emergent phenomenon (though this part doesn't make a substantive difference to anything, it's just an interesting point). Then we consider arguments such as Bruno's, Maudlin's and Putnam's showing that the material computer can't really be generating the consciousness, it must somehow be there on its own, or supervenient on computations in Platonia. Then we conclude that there is no need for the separate physical universe postulate - it is all generated as a simulation in Platonia. And we note at the end of this that consciousness still has no causal efficacy of its own on the dreamed matter in this dreamed world, since the dreamed physics is causally closed. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
