On 9/5/2017 2:21 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
It is not a metaphor. When you say "yes" to the surgeon, he will not replace your brain by a metaphor, but by a digital machine. Then we use the math of self-reference to study what a digital machine can prove and not prove about itself, and the 8 different views are extracted from this. Bp & p gives the classical Theaetetus standard definition of knowledge, for exemple. Socrates criticized it, but the incompleteness theorem makes it able to work in the mechanist context.
If you are only going to reason about an ideal machine, why begin from replacing one's brain with a digital machine? The answer of course is that you really want to identify the machine's function (which is physical) with conscious thought of abstractions like numbers and theorems. This is a bit of a stretch...but OK. Then you go further and idealize the abstract machine so that it proves all of RA and interprets the 8 different logical classes in terms of knowing. This seems to me to already have stretched the connection to human experience beyond the breaking point. But the connection to human experience is the only connection back to physics. Yet a physical world seems essential to human experience. So the argument looks like a reductio to me.
Brent -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
