On 6/19/2016 10:10 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
To ask for that explanation to also somehow encompass the experience
itself is both incoherent, and an illegitimate use of the word
'explanation'."
Of course. Everybody agree here, but that is not what is done by the
philosopher of mind. We still want an explanation for the experience,
and computer science/mathematical logic provides it (at least a solid
embryo). The point is that it should be precise enough to get physics,
which it does, at the propositional level at least.
If you think about explanations deeply, you realize that they bottom
out, if at all, in engineering - in prescriptions for how to control,
create, and manipulate. This is like ostensive understanding.
The alternative, which Bruno actually suggested once but disowns, is for
explanations to form a "virtuous circle" in which everything is
explained in terms of other things ultimately forming loops: NUMBERS ->
"MACHINE DREAMS" -> PHYSICAL -> HUMANS -> PHYSICS -> NUMBERS I call
this "virtuously circular" if it is comprehensive so that everything is
somewhere in the circle.
Brent
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