From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!yale.edu!spool.mu.edu!munnari.oz.au!bruce!monu0.cc.monash.edu.au!monu6!john@publications.ccc.monash.edu.au Tue Nov 26 12:31:17 EST 1991
Article 1477 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Xref: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca sci.philosophy.tech:1043 comp.ai.philosophy:1477
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!yale.edu!spool.mu.edu!munnari.oz.au!bruce!monu0.cc.monash.edu.au!monu6!john@publications.ccc.monash.edu.au
>From: john@publications.ccc.monash.edu.au (John Wilkins)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Daniel Dennett (was Re: Commenting on the posting
Message-ID: <1991Nov20.231227.23195@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au>
Date: 20 Nov 91 23:12:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: monu6.1991Nov20.231227.23195
References: <9740@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
Sender: news@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au (Usenet system)
Organization: Monash University, Melbourne Australia
Lines: 140

In article <9740@optima.cs.arizona.edu>, gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
> 
> In article  <1991Nov18.224139.21896@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au> John Wilkins writes:

Stuff dealt with in another posting deleted
> ] So much of
> ]what used to be irreducible about mind has been reduced - language
> ]learning, visual recognition, emotion - or is promising to be, that...
> 
> I must have missed paper on the electro-chemical mechanisms of
> language learning.  Seriously, although there is a great deal known
> about how people do cognitive things, this knowledge is all
> descriptive in nature.  It tells us that statistically a person is
> more likely to identify a sound as the the word W if they have been
> primed to expect W.  It does not tells us that "priming" is in fact a
> concentration of chemical C on one side of membrane M --much less how
> that concentration developed in response to sensory stimulus or how it
> effects the recognition of words.

No, that's true. Although John Collier would deny this, I believe that
what we have or are in the process of achieving is a description of the
processes that supervene on the actual physical processes. The *physical*
side of things might be biological, or silicon based, or something
else again, but the process we know as "thinking" is, in my view, a
higher order phenomenon, but it must be (ontological dogma here)
a physical substrate.

> 
> Although I strongly deny that there has been any significant progress
> at reducing language or vision to physics (the case for emotion is
> less clear), I do not deny that the reduction exists.  Language and
> vision may well be physical processes, but consciousness is not.
> 

Well I understood (as an amateur) that vision was one of the better
understood physical processes, and that it had been very well reproduced
in robot vision, but maybe I'm wrong.

> ]a believer in Occam's Razor has every reason to be confident that the
> ]obscurantism of occult properties such as "Consciousness" have no real
> ]future.
> 
> Hmmf.  One might as well say that the magic by which material objects
> gain self-awareness is more to be called "occult" than is a frank
> acknowledgement that there is some material that has non-physical
> properties.  One might also argue that Occam's Razor mitigates
> _against_ postulating peculiar processes that are unlike anything
> known, such as the process by which chemicals become aware.

No, an occult property is one that is by definition not amenable to
further explanation or investigation, like Moliere's _virtus dormativa_.
If I said that consciousness was physical in a "hidden" (which is all
occult means) manner, I'd be no better off than you. But the promise is
(believe it if you choose, or not) that we will eventually understand all
the processes that give rise to consciousness, without remainder.
> 
> ]... And biologists can "explain" a lot more about life as a physical
> ]process than they can as a sui generis domain of non-physical (as opposed
> ]to physical-neutral) phenomena.
> 
> Progress in the effort to reduce biology to physics is not evidence
> against anti-reductionism unless some process is reduced that
> anti-reductionists claimed could not be reduced.  No one ever denied
> (to my knowledge) that chemistry played a part in biology or that this
> chemistry could be understood.  Therefore, gaining an understanding of
> biochemistry does not surprise anyone.  The claim of the
> anti-reductionists is that _some_ biological processes are not
> reducible.  Note the importance of the quantifier "some".  This has a
> different meaning from "all".

Well at the turn of the century, quite a few did, eg, Bergson. And I
cited Durkheim as one who used that as an analogue of why social
phenomena  are irreducible.
> 
> One class of processes that were thought irreducible were those that
> involve spontaneous chemical differentation --which seemed to violate
> the second law of thermodynamics.  The demonstration that non-living
> chemical systems can undergo this reaction _is_ in fact an argument
> against anti-reductionists.  Not because it was simple progress in
> biochemistry, but because anti-reductionists said it could not be
> done.  By the way, I'm not a biologist, but if I were, I would almost
> certainly be a reductionists.

Funny, most of the anti-reductionists (let's use the shorter term "holist")
I have read are biologists. See below on the second law.
> 
> ]Whoa! Why do you want to reject a theory that violates thermodynamics?
> ]Because you accept the theory of thermodynamics, of course. Does that give you
> ]reason to reject a theory that violates, say, evolutionary laws of biology?
> 
> Good question.  Have evolutionary biologists described a mechanism
> whereby an organism can evolve without violating the second law?
> (I honestly don't know the answer.  I'm not even sure how one would
> calculate the entropy of an evolutionary change, which occurs in an
> open system to make matters worse.  But the question does give me
> pause now and then...)

My point was that theories are rejected one at a time, not on general grounds
of rational acceptability.

As to thermodynamics and evolution, talk.origins has had some interesting
posts about that. It seems to boil down to: the second law only applies to
closed systems. We eke out a living on the entropy gradient of the Sun.
A couple of researchers have even defined evolution in thermodynamic, or rather
entropic, terms: Brooks and Wiley.
> 
> ]No, it is a different case. So you are not rejecting a class of theories
> ](the set of theories that violate established scientific canons) for "sound
> ]theoretical reasons" of a global kind, but on an ad hoc basis - A' violates A;
> ]B' violates B ... n' violates n.
> 
> Fine.  And likewise, I deny the possibility of any true theory that
> purports to describe consciousness as a physical process on the basis
> that it violates my theory that consciousness cannot arise out of
> purely physical processes.  You can argue the merits of my ontology,
> but you cannot claim --as you seem to above-- that such reasoning is
> illogical.  Given a true premise, my conclusion is true.  Of course,
> if anyone claims to have produced a theory that violates my
> ontological theories, I will be willing to consider it more-or-less
> objectively.

I never thought mentalism was illogical (or less strictly, irrational).
Zeleny was raving again about how he could "show" that physicalism of
mind was false because it had never been done before, which seemed a
stupid thing to say, and roused me from my dogmatic slumbers.
> 
> ]Sigh. It was a joke. No theoretical justification possible [df "joke"].
> 
> Ahh.  Perhaps you were unaware that the charter of this newsgroup
> specifically prohibits "witicisms, japes, jokes, or any other form of
> jest or waggery, or any form of speech intended to relieve the subject
> matter of its accustomed weight of solemnity and gravity."  You also
> forgot the smiley.
> --
> 					David Gudeman
> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
> noao!arizona!gudeman
> 
True, but I put the "I think..." in. How heavy handed do I have to be in
a philosophy newsgroup? :-) :-) :-) :-)!


