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>From: mc703@vax.oxford.ac.uk
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Subject: Re: Zeleny (was Re: Searle
Message-ID: <1991Dec5.202144.3220@vax.oxford.ac.uk>
Date: 5 Dec 91 20:21:44 GMT
References: <12545@pitt.UUCP> <1991Dec3.164932.6119@husc3.harvard.edu> <12563@pitt.UUCP> <1991Dec4.212727.6154@husc3.harvard.edu>
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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?
> 
> 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?
> 
> I see no need to assume dualism, nor to exclude it.

Zeleny is adopting a philosophical position known as anomalous monism.  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").  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).  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.
 
> GEB:
>>        Can you be more specific about these non-physical processes,
> 
> Not yet, but I will soon enough.

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?
 
> GEB:
>>so I can understand why they could not reside in a machine, or are they
>>ineffable?
> 
> No more so than most real numbers.

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

William Chesters, Wadham College, Oxford


