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>From: zeleny@coolidge.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Zeleny (was Re: Searle
Message-ID: <1991Dec6.165648.6234@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 6 Dec 91 21:56:45 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1991Dec6.165648.6234
References: <12563@pitt.UUCP> <1991Dec4.212727.6154@husc3.harvard.edu> <1991Dec5.202144.3220@vax.oxford.ac.uk>
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In article <1991Dec5.202144.3220@vax.oxford.ac.uk> 
mc703@vax.oxford.ac.uk writes:

>In article <1991Dec4.212727.6154@husc3.harvard.edu>,
>zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

>> In article <12563@pitt.UUCP> 
>> geb@dsl.pitt.edu (gordon e. banks) writes:

GEB:
>>>What alternative?

MZ:
>> That thoughts are not reducible to physical processes, although they may be
>> regarded as aspects of the same.

GEB:
>>>                  If thoughts are the result of a non-physical process,
>>>what exactly is it?  Spiritual?

MZ:
>> I see no need to assume dualism, nor to exclude it.

WC:
>Zeleny is adopting a philosophical position known as anomalous monism.  

That would be excluding dualism, wouldn't it?

WC:
>                                                                       The two
>(as far as I know :-)) other proponents of this view are Donald Davidson
>("Mental Events" in his "Essays on Actions and Events") and John McDowell
>("Functionalism and Anomalous Monism").  

Don't forget Quine.

WC:
>                                        Davidson is quite happy to identify
>mental events with physical (brain) ones which are tied together by physical
>laws.  But he doesn't see any reason why those laws should be be expressible in
>ways that we are interested in: ie, involving "mental" terms like 'belief' or
>'justifies' or 'green' rather than dull "physical" ones like 'electron',
>'synapse' or 'causes'.  (In an earlier paper ("Actions, Reasons and Causes") he
>gives an amusing example: if a hurricane reported on page 3 of today's "Times"
>causes a catastrophe reported on page 5 of tomorrow's "Herald", there is no
>reason to suppose that there is a lawlike regularity linking events reported on
>page 3 of the Times to those reported on page 5 of the Herald).

A Marxist surely would disagree.

WC:
>                                                                In fact, he
>can't think what any such law would be like: since the only justifications we
>have for laws involving mental terms seem to rely on synonymy relations, they
>are not reducible to physical laws which can get no purchase on such
>justifications.  There may well be laws governing mental events qua physical
>events, but they won't be interesting; there may well be explanations of mental
>events in mental terms, but they won't be causal (mechanical; computable);
>there may well be generalizations linking the mental and physical domains of
>explanation, but they won't be lawlike because the two domains have no access
>to each others' appropriate (defining) modes of justification.  - Which is not
>to say that pretty damn ""clever"" machines can't be built; only that what we
>think of as mental processes (what we mean when we say "cogito") are not
>explicable in physical terms.

Davidson's position seems to be bereft of any positive justification; as
exemplified above, the standard of his argument against reductive or
nomonogical materialism rarely transcends asserting that "there's no reason
to suppose that X", where X is some reductionist assumption.  I, on the
other hand, strive to demonstrate that there IS a reason to suppose that
nomological reductionism is wrong.

GEB:
>>>        Can you be more specific about these non-physical processes,

MZ:
>> Not yet, but I will soon enough.

WC:
>What form are you intending your specification to take?  Will it be in mental
>terms (it clearly won't be in physical terms)?  If so, do you intend it to be
>reducible to non-computable physics or are you espousing anomalous monism or
>what?

I don't expect to offer a specification, but only a description, which will
take the form of a triple aspect theory of mind.

GEB:
>>>so I can understand why they could not reside in a machine, or are they
>>>ineffable?

MZ:
>> No more so than most real numbers.

WC:
>Platonism isn't the only philosophy of mathematics you know!  There are people
>who (horror) don't think real numbers exist.

Their opinions are absolutely irrelevant to mathematics as it stands.

>William Chesters, Wadham College, Oxford


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