On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 4:56:12 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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> On 20 Jun 2019, at 14:36, PGC <[email protected] <javascript:>> wrote:
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> On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 2:02:37 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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>> On 20 Jun 2019, at 06:36, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>> [email protected]> wrote:
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>>
>> On 6/19/2019 5:41 PM, Pierz wrote:
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>> Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite
>>> regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison
>>> here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only
>>> relational ones.
>>>
>>>
>>> I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite
>>> regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange
>>> loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.
>>>
>>
>> Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of
>> circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be
>> a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered",
>> unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground
>> somewhere.
>>
>>
>> But if you stop worrying about what exists (where "exists" is theory
>> dependent anyway) and think or relationships not a things but as
>> explanations, then you can have a *virtuous* circle of explanation, i.e.
>> one that encompasses everything. To explain/understand something you start
>> from something you already understand and work your way around.
>> Empirically, that's pretty much how we learn things...you always have to
>> start from things you understand.
>>
>>
>> Absolutely, but that is the reason to not start from a circular
>> explanation, but from a simple non circular like one, which, if Turing
>> universal, will account for all circular processes. Then, this attribute
>> mind to machines, and kill all reductionist conception that we can have on
>> machines, and thus on humans too!
>>
>>
> You pretend that this immunizes people from evil
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> I claim that it destroys the reductionist conception of machine, like the
> one hold by 19th century materialist, or more recently by Searle, and other
> “anti-mechanists”.
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So it destroys the bad/evil kind of reductionism.
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> or that such approaches were inherently more truthful, more correct for
> purely aesthetic ("simple") reasons.
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> On the contrary. I claim it to be more simple, but anyone can try a non
> mechanist theory, and for all what I *know* they might be correct. Yet, the
> evidences obtained today favours Mechanism.
>
In your mind, with your personal conceptions of truth, falsifiability, and
a taste for anthropomorphizing formal systems by yourself. As if there's
this huge front of mechanics and physicalists weighing the evidence, with
your posts as the credible, representative voice and authority. You're the
emperor without clothes, the general with armies in the future.
> In science, we never know what we hit the truth.
>
>
Please, spare me the science preacher rhetorical bag.
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> It's ambitious: you don't offer what may appeal to other folks and their
> sensibilities, you clothe it as "the real reason to not start circular”.
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> I just suggest that Brent’s virtuous circle theory is coherent with a non
> circular ontology, like RA, and that it has to be possible, if mechanism is
> true.
>
> I put my hypotheses on the table, and I propose to share a reasoning. Ask
> any question if you feel something is not valid.
>
What good is sharing reasoning when you move the goalpost with every post?
You'll post whatever fits. One post ago you're "absolutely the reason to
not start circular", which becomes "only share a reasoning if mechanism is
true". For somebody so deeply concerned lecturing folks on proper
scientific reasoning, its unsurprising that this is what it is. PGC
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