Re: Addressing Scientific Reductionism


"dkomo" <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dvujo6$vkk$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Robert J. Kolker wrote:
dkomo wrote:
[snip much]
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.

I am in general agreement with dkomo that 'mind' is a useful word, and
in disagreement with Robert Kolker that the pending reduction of mind to
brain and brain to chemistry makes it foolish to even talk about the
word 'mind'.

I agree with dkomo that the existence of multiple levels in computer
systems, and the usefulness and 'reality' of those levels for practitioners
at each level, presents an analogy in support of his position.

But the analogy can mislead as well. A computer system is a human-designed
and human-engineered system. It was created in the form that it has
precisely because such a clean multi-level reduction is possible. The
levels do not 'interpenetrate' very much. Computer programs like
'Eliza' (the non-directive psychotherapist simulation) did not need
to be rewritten when the lowest levels of reduction changed from
TTL to NMOS to CMOS.

Systems that are 'engineered' by natural selection, such as 'mind', are
much messier. Some aspects of 'mind' may reduce nicely to patterns of
neural firings, but others may 'skip a level' and go directly to
concentrations of brain chemicals. It is very unlikely that it will
be possible to 'download' a human personality into a different low-level
mechanism of computation (a computer, say) without significant
'rewriting'.


.

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