On 12/21/2017 3:27 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi David,
Sometimes your responses really puzzle me Brent. What you say above almost
makes it sound as though you just don't get the distinction Telmo is
pointing to. But based on what you have said at other times I think you do
get it, but because you also know that there's really no explicating that
distinction in a purely third person way, you sometimes want to say that
that's as far as explanation can legitimately go and the rest is just woo.
Actually I think of it the other way around. You and Chalmers et al are
so invested in the "hard problem" being hard that you overlook the fact
that almost all problems are "hard"; they have no fixed, objective
ontological foundation. We showed that life was based on chemistry, and
chemistry was based on molecular physics, which was based on atomic
physics, which was based on quantum field theory, which assumes
spacetime, which we don't understand. Seems hard. If we succeed in
explaining spacetime in terms of entanglement of quantum states will
that be the end? I doubt it. "The end" may just be the end of our grasp.
When you write "there's really no explicating that distinction in a
purely third person way" it seems analogous to a vitalist saying,
"Sure, maybe life is chemistry, but that doesn't explain what it feels
like to be alive." You're insisting that the feeling of being conscious
must be explicated in a non-third person way...which is a contradiction
in terms. "Explication" is a third person relation. You want an
explanation but you want to keep the mystery too.
Brent
"One cannot guess the real difficulties of a problem before
having solved it."
--- Carl Ludwig Siegel
Thanks for saying. This puzzles me too. It's not just Brent, I know a
lot of smart people that do exactly the same.
Cute but irrelevant. As has been said when we've discussed Telmo's point in
the past, the fact of the matter is that ontological reduction *just is*
ontological elimination. That's the whole point of the reductive project and
precisely therein lies its explanatory power. But somehow that same
ontological reduction doesn't entail *epistemological* elimination. There's
the rub.
Precisely.
For me, and for these reasons, emergentism in its current form is woo.
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