John Collins writes
> Dear Stathis,
> This was an interesting post. You're right in that, until quite
> recently, we've understood the world only as well as we've needed to, in
> order to survive. But if you believe, as some people on this list do, that
> instantaneous 'observer moments' are the only fundamentally real objects in
> the universe, (and that the reasoning, 'I think therefore I am' runs
> primarily in that direction) then it is the logical structure of our
> thoughts that is at each moment retrospectively generating a history in
> which there evolved a creature intelligent enough to think them.
It is indeed a question of which one suspects to be more
fundamental: observer moments? or what I'll call "atoms
and processes".
An important aspect of this is the age-old desire for
*certainty*. But beginning with several developments
in 20th century mathematics, perhaps culminating in
Morris Kline's excellent book "The Loss of Certainty",
this goal becoming more and more deprecated with the
passing of each decade.
In fact, the XX century saw many axiom-based philosophic
schemes which, it seems to me, were little more than
manifestations of "math-envy". And such schemes and such
thinkers are in less repute than ever these days. (Yet it
sounds as though a number of people on this list are
impressed with the *certainty* with which one can regard
his or her 1st person experiences, and believe that this
is one of its chief advantages.)
Instead, the best theories appear to be those based upon
ideas similar to those of Popper, with "Pan-Critical
Rationalism" being the highest and best form. From these
we affirm that our best theories are those whose origins
---however dubious---have, vitally, withstood powerful
and well-directed criticism, and the test of time.
Among these honored theories are, of course, all our best
scientific theories including heliocentrism, the theory of
evolution, GR and QM. Also these last centuries deployed ideas
that were (or should be) the death of vitalism, from Kohler in
1828, through Urey in 1952 to Watson and Crick in 1953. These
laid what seem to be an irrefutable basis for the main contentions
of materialism, to wit, that even the most complex phenomena we
know of, including the workings of the human brain, ultimately
reduce to the laws of chemistry and physics (i.e. QM).
It is difficult to overstate how successful QM has been. Accuracies
of fifteen decimal places are routine! No one could have anticipated
such unprecedented success. Thus we at this time have very little
reason to doubt the contention that brain behavior ontologically
reduces to QM.
To me, regarding "observer-moments" as fundamental smacks of
solipsism. It strikes me as entirely useless. The different
observer-moments of different (or even the same) entities are
not at all comparable, and we have no means (except
introspective ones) to study the phenomena.
Why not instead adopt the scientific model? That is, that
we are three-dimensional creatures ensconced in a world
governed by the laws of physics, or, what I'll call the
"atoms and processes" model. About observer-moments, I would
say what LaPlace answered to Napoleon about a deity:
"I have no need of that hypothesis".
To be sure, we all have our 1st person experiences, but they're
inaccessible to anyone else. Moreover, their very existence
is hardly problematical: would you really believe some aliens
who landed here and enjoined us in conversation, and then claimed
to have none?
As Eugene Leitl is reported to have said, "Experience is just
what the system looks like from the inside".
Jack earlier wrote
> [Lee wrote]
> > It wouldn't
> > make sense on evolutionary grounds for typical mammals
> > such as ourselves to be unable to report internal
> > impressions, plans, feelings, and anticipations.
>
> This it seems to me is a black box approach. Shades of Skinner's
> behaviorism? Not terribly useful or satisfying IMHO. One could
> take the same approach to any biological system or process:
> pronounce it adaptive (at least sufficiently till now) and
> leave it at that. "Next problem!".
I would say that it's not quite fair to label the materialist
approach "behaviorist", because the behaviorists were notorious
for limiting their inquiries to areas outside the brain. The
brain is a material device, and of course demands explanations.
First-person accounts, on the contrary, while irreplaceable in
psychiatry, have never been of much use in scientific theories,
and efforts to so use them were generally abandoned along about
1890, and for very good reason.
Lee Corbin
Received on Tue May 10 2005 - 00:36:05 PDT
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