Hi Bruno,
I should probably let this thread die so that we can concentrate on
the MGA thread. But there are a few more things I wanted to respond to.
On Nov 18, 2008, at 9:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> On 18 Nov 2008, at 14:14, Kory Heath wrote:
>> In the meantime, I at least want to say that I'm pretty sure you've
>> read a lot more into my term "mathematical physicalism" than I
>> intended. I use "mathematical physicalism" simply to refer to the
>> idea
>> that the materialist's picture of matter is problematic in the way
>> that the vitalists idea of the "life force" is problematic, and that
>> mathematical facts-of-the-matter unproblematically fill the role that
>> this problematic "physical matter" is supposed to fill.
>
> OK. But then what's the difference with mathematicalism?
Maybe that's the term I should be using. I thought that the term
"mathematicalism" had some other philosophical meaning, but I now see
that it only gets 29 hits on Google, and most of them are from this
list. I like the term, and am happy to commandeer it.
However, it still seems that you and I can't agree on how to use it.
For instance, you say:
> The fact is that I believe mathemaricalism is probably false too, but
> it could be false in the same sense that incompleteness phenomenon à-
> la- Skolem-Tarski could be used to justify that "the whole of
> mathematics" cannot be a mathematical object itself.
What is your definition of "mathematicalism" here?
> If you agree that physics has become a statistic on computations "as
> seen from inside", everything is ok.
I do agree with this. So everything is ok. :)
> Then MGA will show what you
> already believe, which is that the computations does not need to be
> implemented in our, or any other, stuffy primitive material universe.
Ok. Can you tell me a one or two word name for the belief that
"computations do not need to be implemented in our, or any other,
stuffy primitive material universe"? To put it another way, can we
come up with a name for the proposition that "the Movie Graph Argument
is sound"? I want to use the term "mathematicalism" to refer to this
(and only this). But above you say that you believe that
"mathematicalism" is probably false. Yet you seem to believe that the
MGA is sound, so I think you must be using the term "mathematicalism"
in some other way.
Maybe you don't want to use "mathematicalism" to refer to "the
conclusion of the MGA", because that elevates your argument to the
status of a position. For what it's worth, I feel that it's a tactical
mistake for you to claim that you don't hold positions and that you
don't do philosophy. Your critics may end up accusing you of
disingenuousness. I understand full well that you do not claim that
COMP is true. You only claim that it is testable. In that sense, I
understand that you don't hold a position on COMP. But the claim that
COMP is testable is also a position! The claim that "the MGA shows
that computations do not need to be implemented in our, or any other,
stuffy primitive material universe" is a position. The claim that "if
MECH is true, then MAT is false" is a position, even if you remain
agnostic about whether or not MECH is true. This might just be
difference about how we use the term "position", but it seems to be
causing some confusion.
-- Kory
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Received on Thu Nov 20 2008 - 04:13:53 PST