On 21 June 2018 at 00:53, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On 6/20/2018 4:51 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> >> Hi Bruno, >> >>>> I follow your reasoning, from one of your recent articles. This leaves >>>> me dissatisfied, but if I try to verbalize this dissatisfaction I feel >>>> stuck in a loop. Perhaps this illustrates your point. >>> >>> >>> We might need to do some detour about what it would mean to explain >>> consciousness, or matter. >>> I might ask myself if you are not asking too much, perhaps. Eventually, >>> something has to remain unexplainable for reason of self-consisteny. I >>> suspect it will be just where our intuition of numbers or combinators, or of >>> the distinction finite/infinite comes from (assuming mechanism), or just why >>> we trust the doctor! >> >> I thought about it for some time. It seems that at a meta level, we >> are always stuck in this situation of "give me one miracle for free >> and everything else becomes explainable". The miracle can be matter, >> or consciousness, or arithmetic. > > > Do you see that is just another form of my circle of virtuous explanation. > Start wherever you understand or accept the starting point and then you can > go around the circle and get to everything else.
I see your point and even concede that it might be the wise approach for many things, but I don't think one can "get to everything else" this way. The problem with my analogy with heliocentrism/geocentrism is that these are, in the end, compatible -- but the same doesn't seem to apply to materialism/computationalism. I think that Bruno proves convincingly that the two are incompatible. I'm not sure if you are convinced by the UDA argument or not. Are you? If one takes this incompatibility seriously, things become a bit more tricky. In this case, and to expand on what I was suggesting: - There is a set of beliefs M that are consistent with materialism; - There is a set of beliefs C that are consistent with computationalism; - The intersection between M and C, let's call it A, is non-empty but; - There are justified true beliefs that belong to C if one starts from comp, but not to A, let's say C* - There are justified true beliefs that belong to M if one starts from materialism, but not to A, let's say M* - Furthermore, there is empirical data that fits C* and not M*, and vice-versa. Most people nowadays live only within A. It used to be the case that people lived with A + R (R is some set of religious beliefs), and that is more or less what enabled us to build civilization. R might be wrong, but it is clearly useful (and also has a very dark side, of course). A-only-living is the domain of mid-life crisis, existential despair, hating Mondays and scientific utilitarianism. M* is the domain of the emergentist project of neuroscience, and I would argue is the proto-religion of many contemporary scientists, and especially militant atheists. C* is the domain of neoplatonism. Not surprisingly, it irritates M* people, and vice-versa. On a practical level, it makes sense to operate in M* while performing surgery, but it does not make sense to restrict oneself to M* when trying to answer fundamental questions. I think that's the point where it becomes religious dogmatism - R*. Telmo. > 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 [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
