On 4/18/2019 2:53 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
That would be the mistake of Dgital Physics/Physicalism.
It is like saying that some program u generate the physical universe.
That is not entirely excluded from the mechanist hypothesis, but even
if that is the case, such an u (and of course all the u’ such that
phi_u = phi_u’ extensionally) must be derived from elementary
arithmetic, if mechanism is correct.
But that can be shown to be not quite plausible, as this would make
our substitution level so low that the only “artificial brain”
possible would be the entire physical universe. In that case, most of
our biology and physics would be false. It is such a weakening of
Mechanism, that it would make Mechanism wrong FAPP, contradicting all
the evidences that we have for Mechanism, like evolution, molecular
biology or quantum physics.
That is one of my reservations about your theory, that it requires the
substitution level to take into account the environment. Not the whole
universe, but representative local sample of the universe. It wouldn't
make our biology and physics false, but it might make them what we call
"effective theories" in physics, i.e. not fundamental in the
metaphysical sense but approximations to an unknown fundamental theory
that is effective in the domain where we can test it.
Brent
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