Hi Bruno Marchal Good point. I hadn't thought about a "nothing but" problem with comp, but as with any evidence (such as a missing auto, or a possibly unfaithfuyl lover) you have to consider alternative explanations. Popper may have discussed this topic. Others certainly have.
Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/12/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-12, 06:26:07 Subject: Re: The "nothing but" fallacy in explaining away God (or anything) On 12 Sep 2012, at 11:57, Roger Clough wrote: Freud thought that he had explained away God with his book "Moses and Monotheism". What he says in there is probably true, but just because you can give a reason for something doesn't mean that that's all there is to it. If something is true, it would be suprising if it did NOT show up as a social phenomenon. Or it did not show up in myth and folk tales. I call this the "nothing but" fallacy. It is the bread and butter of atheists critics of religion. Sam Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and the other atheist critics made a good living based on this fallacy. Simlilarly critics of the near death experience sometimes explain away the near death experience as due to some chemical that the brain exudes as death nears. To repeat, if the near death esperience is real I would be surprised if there WEREN'T a physical correlate. No problem with any of this, unless you see here an argument against comp, in which case I miss it. Actually the main mistake of computationalist materialists is that they reduce machines to just their body, and are doing the "nothing but" fallacy. But computationalism leads to the impossibility of weak materialism, (the doctrine that primary matter exists, or that physicalism is true), and "reduces" the mind-body problem to the search of an explanation of the physical collective "hallucination" (first person plural) from arithmetic/computer science (math). Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/12/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-11, 11:13:48 Subject: Re: The poverty of computers On 10 Sep 2012, at 21:45, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 Bruno Marchal wrote: > A better question to John would be: explain where consciousness and universes > come from Paraphrasing Mark Twain: Drawing on my fine command of the English language I stood up, looked him straight in the eye, and said "I don't know". Good. So we can do research. > Someone who say that he does not believe in God, usually take for granted > other sort of God, that is they make a science, like physics, Science can't explain everything but it beats something like religion which can't explain anything. Science is not a field, but a methodology, or even just a human (or machine) attitude. Why not apply it in theology? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
