Dear Bruno,
As for your showng of "necessity" of a 1st personviewpoint , I still do
not understand your argument and that is a failure on my part. ;-) As to
Pratt's ideas, let me quote directly from one of his papers:
http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf
"Some of the questions however remain philosophically challenging even
today. A central tenet of Cartesianism is mind-body dualism, the principle
that mind and body are the two basic substances of which reality is
constituted. Each can exist separately, body as realized in inanimate
objects and lower forms of life, mind as realized in abstract concepts and
mathematical certainties. According to Descartes the two come together only
in humans, where they undergo causal interaction, the mind reflecting on
sensory perceptions while orchestrating the physical motions of the limbs
and other organs of the body.
The crucial problem for the causal interaction theory of mind and body
was its mechanism: how did it work?
Descartes hypothesized the pineal gland, near the center of the brain,
as the seat of causal interaction. The objection was raised that the mental
and physical planes were of such a fundamentally dissimilar character as to
preclude any ordinary notion of causal interaction. But the part about a
separate yet joint reality of mind and body seemed less objectionable, and
various commentators offered their own explanations for the undeniably
strong correlations of mental and physical phenomena.
Malebranche insisted that these were only correlations and not true
interactions, whose appearance of interaction was arranged in every detail
by God by divine intervention on every occasion of correlation, a theory
that naturally enough came to be called occasionalism. Spinoza freed God
from this demanding schedule by organizing the parallel behavior of mind and
matter as a preordained apartheid emanating from God as the source of
everything. Leibniz postulated monads, cosmic chronometers miraculously
keeping perfect time with each other yet not interacting.
These patently untestable answers only served to give dualism a bad
name, and it gave way in due course to one or another form of monism: either
mind or matter but not both as distinct real substances. Berkeley opined
that matter did not exist and that the universe consisted solely of ideas.
Hobbes ventured the opposite: mind did not exist except as an artifact of
matter. Russell [Rus27] embraced neutral monism, which reconciled Berkeley's
and Hobbes' viewpoints as compatible dual accounts of a common neutral
Leibnizian monad.
This much of the history of mind-body dualism will suffice as a
convenient point of reference for the sequel. R. Watson's Britannica article
[Wat86] is a conveniently accessible starting point for further reading. The
thesis of this paper is that mind-body dualism can be made to work via a
theory that we greatly prefer to its monist competitors. Reflecting an era
of reduced expectations for the superiority of humans, we have implemented
causal interaction not with the pineal gland but with machinery freely
available to all classical entities, whether newt, pet rock, electron, or
theorem (but not quantum mechanical wavefunction, which is sibling to if not
an actual instance of our machinery)."
and
"We have advanced a mechanism for the causal interaction of mind and
body, and argued that separate additional mechanisms for body-body and
mind-mind interaction can be dispensed with; mind-body interaction is all
that is needed. This is a very different outcome from that contemplated by
17th century Cartesianists, who took body-body and mind-mind interaction as
given and who could find no satisfactory passage from these to mind-body
interaction. Even had they found a technically plausible solution to their
puzzle, mind-body interaction would presumably still have been regarded as
secondary to body-body interaction. We have reversed that priority.
One might not expect mind-body duality as a mere philosophical problem
to address any urgent need outside of philosophy. Nevertheless we have
offered solutions to the following practical problems that could be
construed as particular applications of our general solution to Descartes'
mind-body problem, broadly construed to allow scarecrows and everything else
to have minds."
There are his own words!
Stephen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruno Marchal" <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
To: "Stephen Paul King" <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
Cc: "Stathis Papaioannou" <stathispapaioannou.domain.name.hidden>;
<everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2005 10:18 AM
Subject: Re: Olympia's Beautiful and Profound Mind
Le 15-mai-05, à 15:40, Stephen Paul King a écrit :
> Two points: I am pointing out that the "non-interactional" idea of
> computation and any form of monism will fail to account for the
> "necessity" of 1st person viewpoints.
You know that the "necessity" of 1st person viewpoints is what I
consider the most easily explained (through the translation of the
Theaetetus in arithmetic or in any language of a lobian machine).
You refer to paper as hard and technical as my thesis. You should
explain why you still believe the 1 person is dismissed in comp or any
monism.
Also, Pratt seems to me monist, and its mathematical dualism does not
address the main question in philosphy of mind/cognitive science. Its
paper is interesting but could hardly be refer as an authority on those
question at this stage.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Sun May 15 2005 - 14:04:36 PDT