On 5/3/2017 11:22 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 3 May 2017 10:47 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 5/3/2017 2:34 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
Le 3 mai 2017 11:23 PM, "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> a écrit :
On 5/3/2017 1:32 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
This an extreme reductionist view, i.e. if X is the
fundamental ontology then only X exists. But that leads
to nonsense: "If the standard model is fundamental
ontology then football doesn't exist."
But it's true, football does not exist in any ontological
sense, and we are talking about ontology.
So neither Sherlock Holmes nor Donald Trump exist. That's
certainly a relief.
What about ontology don't you understand?
I don't understand why atoms imply that things made of atoms don't
exist.
Ok, this the heart and core of the disagreement. Noone is saying that
things made of atoms don't exist and your saying this is just setting
up an easy straw man for you to pointlessly knock down. So what do you
suppose that Quentin and I are saying here? I'll repeat it. "Extreme
reductionism" as you call it (and what other kind is there unless you
believe in some form of causally effective top-down emergence?) is the
search for the ontological building blocks of a theory which
themselves will remain unexplained but in terms of which all other
ontological composition will be understood. That at least is the
ambition. So if we say that atoms are the building blocks then the
claim is that everything else is to be understood as the interactions
of atoms (this is meant to be illustrative only).
So what then is the status in the theory of "everything else" if such
entities are merely ontologically composite and consequently at that
fundamental level indistinguishable from the interactions of their
components? The answer (obviously) is that their "concrete" or
substantial emergence is perceptual, or epistemological as we like to
say here. I suspect the fact that some people find this so hard to
accept is not some intellectual barrier to understanding, since the
distinction is in fact rather obvious, but because of a distaste for
taking epistemology as a fundamental determinant of reality.
Maybe some people, but one of my slogans is "Epistemology precedes
ontology."
Of course when we speak of epistemology here it's not merely its final
neurocognitive stages we should have in mind, but the entire process
of epistemological emergence of perceiving subjects and their
environments from the posited ontological basis. For this of course
we need an adequate theory that takes both aspects and in particular
their peculiar entanglement into account. And indeed it is only the
ultimate explanatory success of such a theory that can justify the
ascription of "existence" to anything above the level of the
ontological base because, as you will recall, the whole point of the
reductionist thrust is that this base is capable of explaining the
evolution of its states entirely in its own terms, without any
necessary reference to composition or emergence.
I agree with that, except I would have ended the sentence at
"anything". It is the explanatory (plus predictive) success that
justifies the existence of the ontological base as well as the theory
built on it. That's what I mean by epistemology precedes ontology.
I would esteem it a courtesy if you would address the above argument
directly, as distinct from changing the subject in line with your
preferred way of thinking, as I would truly like to know what you
think is wrong with it. As Bruno says, a different argument is not the
same thing as a counter-argument.
My "counter-argument", i.e. why I'm not convinced by Bruno's argument is
two-fold. First, I don't see any predictive success and only a little
explanatory success. And I see some predictive failure - although it's
like string theory in that it seems difficult to say exactly what it
predicts about human consciousness. Second, as an argument it is not a
logical inference, it is a reductio. It starts from a physical
classical computer can be substituted for you brain with no profound
effect on your consciousness. Then it purports to conclude that the
physical aspect of the computer is irrelevant and simply the
mathematical existence of computation in Platonia is enough to realize
your consciousness. Which is OK, but I think the consequence is
overstated. It is the mathematical existence of your thoughts AND the
world they are about that is necessary to maintaining your
consciousness. So it becomes a (better, more explicit, more
comprehensive) version of Tegmark's computational universe hypothesis.
Looked at another way it is saying the world is everything that is true
in a model of some axioms (either Peano or Turing or...) and if you
think this doesn't explain something about the world you're wrong
because it explains everything explainable and then some. But what
explains everything fails to explain at all.
Brent
David
Brent
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