On 12/21/2017 12:28 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 21 Dec 2017 18:58, "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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
Please be advised that you have no sound basis for expounding on what
I'm supposedly 'invested' in. For the record, I would admit to being
invested in not sweeping a problem under the carpet because it's
inconvenient. That said, I have no particular commitment to one style
of explanation above another except to the extent that it seems to
promise an advance or impediment to understanding. For my part, any
disagreement between us rests wholly on those considerations, as in
the present case.
that you overlook the fact that almost all problems are "hard";
they have no fixed, objective ontological foundation.
You're changing the subject, not for the first time. That's not the
relevant sense of the term in this case, as I assumed you accepted. I
said I thought you understood what clearly and categorically
differentiates this problem from the ones you mention, or any other in
the canon. But I'm prepared to revise my opinion if you insist.
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.
Well, yes it may be. That's even a philosophical position of sorts.
But my interest in Bruno's work is precisely because in my experience
it's an approach to the elusive relation between the mental and the
physical that seems capable of working with the relevant categories of
both without ignoring or distorting either. I haven't in all honesty
encountered any others about which I could say the same. That doesn't
make it correct of course, but it does, in my view, render your
effective dismissal of the problem area, as either illusory,
irrelevant or insoluble, somewhat premature.
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."
That's a distortion of the vitalist position. What you say here about
the feeling of being alive is more like a restatement of the HP.
Vitalism was first and foremost an inability to clearly specify and
hence differentiate living and non-living processes, which seemed at a
gross level of analysis to be so unlike each other as to require the
intervention of an additional causal principle. When the the relation
between chemistry and biology was better understood, it became
apparent that this was not the case. But the matter never strayed, nor
needed to, from the detailed explication of third person processes of
one sort or another. Hence nothing 'vital' is thereby omitted.
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.
It must be explicated in a way that differentiates first and third
person categories in the relevant and indispensable ways. Bruno for
one has given us at least a start in seeing how that could be handled
at least in principle. In particular, it must show why and how the
first person is not consigned, from a merely a posteriori position, to
the status of an arbitrarily superadded category, as it is and must
always be in any purely third person explication.
Suppose it were found, in the course of my "engineering solution" that
certain kinds of self referential information processing (which of
course would obey Goedel's limitations) were necessary or evolutionarily
favored aspects of AI. Why would that not be just as satisfactory a
solution as Bruno's? Why is self reference in abstract mathematical
proofs a solution, while an evolutionary explication not?
Brent
Which was Telmo's point.
David
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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