Re: RT list: Is it right to think about RT as a materialising theoretical attempt?

 
MALFET WROTE:

@ M.J. Murphy

* Saying simply "it's all down to synapses" is indeed not terribly helpful. What of it?

* As to the aspirations of RT to materiality, the trouble is not the slowness. Certainly my human impatience would like to see answers to these questions before I am dead, but fastness or slowness do not themselves demonstrate anything about the truth or non-truth of the claims at stake here. That's not the nature of my objection.

* Rather, my objection is that RT stakes the existence of its categories on shaky ontological ground. If pragmatic function is an intrinsically computational process, the objects of that process will be one kind of thing. If pragmatic function is an irreducibly (non-computational) physical process, the objects of that process will be another kind of thing. If it is some complex admixture of the two (the most interesting possibility of all!), the objects will be a third kind of thing all together. Without clarity on this topic, it is unwarranted and unreasonable to claim materialism for a theory of mental process.

* The planets might be *represented* as a formal system reductively. Chess *is* a formal system intrinsically. This is a fundamental difference in the world of Turing machines and computational theories of mind.
Received on Tue Sep 25 16:20:24 2012