On 13/06/2016 7:12 am, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 6/12/2016 10:27 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
William S. Cooper, "The Origin of Reason" makes an argument that
mathematics is a way of brains thinking about things that was found
by evolution, just like mobility, metabolism, reproduction,...and a
lot of other functions. Bruno doesn't like that story though
because it means mathematics only exists as instantiated in brains.
It is not a question of liking this or not. It is just that Cooper,
and many contemporaries, assumed some physical universe, and that
this assumption put the mind-body problem under the rug. It is like
saying God made it. They don't push enough their own Darwinian logic.
That's begging the question. You assume arithmetic; which sweeps the
mind-body problem under the rug by making the "body" part hard.
Everybody starts by assuming something. Assuming physics and
providing an evolution based account of the development of mind and
minds development of arithmetic is just as legitimate as starting with
arithmetic and trying to derive matter and mind.
Assuming arithmetic does not even account for mind, much less account
for matter. Saying that consciousness is a computation is empty until
one specifies precisely what form of computation. And why that form of
computation rather than some other? I don't see that computationalism
actually solves anything -- the problems it leaves unanswered are every
bit as difficult as the problems one started with. At least with
scientific realism, one has the objective external world to underpin
one's experience: /i.e./, one knows that it works, even if one is not
quite sure how.
Bruce
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