On 6/21/2018 3:55 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
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;
In the virtuous circle theory you could start with M and explain C or
vice versa. At least if C is a comprehensive theory as proposed. So A=C=M.
- There are justified true beliefs that belong to C if one starts from
comp, but not to A, let's say C*
Justified how? By logical inference from Peano's axioms? Note that C
and M proceed to produce explanations in different ways and M doesn't
aim to produce beliefs, only theories. I realize that Bruno uses
"belief" as shorthand for a relation between computable and some ideal
machine. So it's not clear to me that "belief" means the same thing in
C and M.
- 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.
I don't think that's the case. C seems to me to be capable to
explaining anything (e.g. we're living in the Matrix). The theories of
M are certainly incomplete, but if there is empirical data inconsistent
with those theories it just shows they have limited domain. If there is
empirical data that is impossible to include in M how would we know; how
could we be sure that it could not be included?
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.
Get a grip, Telmo. A is the best place to live.
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.
And it's the domain of the pseudo-science mystic who, feeling the loss
of R, longs to recover that world view that puts them at the center of
everything.
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*.
Who is more dogmatic about their world view, the MWI'ists or the
CI'ers? Which sounds more like a religion, "Everything exists, we just
can't see it." or "Shut up and calculate."?
Brent
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