Brent,
I wonder, what do you mean with materialism (I ask this having been a
materialist myself)?
Physics only describes relations. (see for instance here
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/)
I gather you accept MWI, so quite a lot of relations hold.
The question is, why the quantum (as Wheeler, I think, put it)? Bruno's
COMP gives a very elegant _explanation_.
Also, with COMP, the mind-body problem indeed disappears. We have
computations within computations within computations. (And I think that
Bruno is correct when assuming that there is no _lowest_ level).
It needn't even be a pure idealism, but rather Russelian neutral monism
- some states more or less conscious - the degree of consciousness
depending on the degree of self-reflexivity (see for instance here for a
theory of consciousness which works well with COMP:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/)
Back to the ontological problem of the "grounding": materialism is in
essence the thesis that there is, at bottom, a "substance", which has no
independent properties, but serves as instantiator for other properties.
But why should such a strange thing exist? Why not let the relations
stand for themselves? Especially for an MWI-theorist; if you only accept
a single world, matter does seem much more plausible - going through
diverse transformations, that being all there is, and located somewhere
in an otherwise empty spacetime or whatever - but those are all very
naive intuitions which modern physics has moved beyond (and all the more
so critical reflection on the results of modern physics).
A big question: why should there be such a thing as a lowest level, a
grounding? While for a materialist, the imagination of "turtles all the
way down"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
is quite strange, computations all the way down is very intuitive. Well,
awe-inspiring intuitive ;-)) Think of the fractal video Bruno sent out
a little while ago.
What explanatory power does matter hold? None, I conjecture. Please give
at least one so we can discuss.
Cheers,
Günther
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Received on Mon Jan 19 2009 - 14:58:17 PST