Re: Addressing Scientific Reductionism

Robert J. Kolker wrote:

dkomo wrote:



[snip]



Watches don't talk or think.


Thinking and talking is just another kind of tick-tock. If you look very
carefully all you will see are neurons a-popping and various chemicals
being produced at the synaptic junctions. We are meat that walks and talks.



Is


there a non-material time spook in a watch that makes it produce time
readings? Or is it simply the turning of gears or the operations of
semi-conductor logic? Now apply the above questions analogically to the
issue of mind vs brain.



Analogically? Perhaps metaphorically? Here goes.

Am I really looking at a newsgroup browser program as I type this or is
the program really just the product of a very large number of quantum
mechanical wavefunctions moving through silicon wafers and copper
traces? For that matter, is even this laptop computer real? Or is it
also a non-material time spook based on QM wavefunctions?

What's that you say? The laptop is composed of electrons and nuclei?
Or it's composed of molecules and crystals? None of these are real
either. They're just QM probability waves. There's no such thing as
matter.

I (i.e., my mind) think(s) that reductionists are really strange people.


But it is the reductionists who produced the computer with which you
propogate this rather snotty opinion.


Actually, no. The people who design computers and computer software are
not reductionists. They work at various levels of abstraction when they
design: transistor level, logic gate level, register transfer level,
microcode level, operating system level, application program level, and
so on. To each designer, the level he works at is "real".

Computer systems are a good example of emergence because they are
composed of at least half a dozen different levels, each level emerging
from the level beneath it, each level characterized by its own laws.
They are a good hierarchical analog to the chemical/neuron/brain/mind
system. They are also a good analog to multicellular organisms in general.

Mind exists in the same sense as, say, a computer program does. Both
are processes. Both can be observed and analyzed. Both are real.
Trying to reduce them down to some core base level is silly.


--dkomo@xxxxxxxx


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