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Template:Causal intervention and symbolic language: Difference between revisions
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Now, [[philosophy]] nuts: recall from your ''God, Mind and Free Will'' intro lectures the materialist “clincher” that proved consciousness must be wholly material: ''there is no evidence for non-material causal interventions in the physical world''. If there were, there would be some kind of injection or leakage of energy into the physical system. But there is not: energy is conserved. A non-material consciousness to would invalidate the laws of thermodynamics: non-material consciousness breaks rules of thermodynamics, in other words. Game over. | Now, [[philosophy]] nuts: recall from your ''God, Mind and Free Will'' intro lectures the materialist “clincher” that proved consciousness must be wholly material: ''there is no evidence for non-material causal interventions in the physical world''. If there were, there would be some kind of injection or leakage of energy into the physical system. But there is not: energy is conserved. A non-material consciousness to would invalidate the laws of thermodynamics: non-material consciousness breaks rules of thermodynamics, in other words. Game over. | ||
But, hold on: this is, as [[Daniel Dennett]] articulates it, {br|Darwin’s Dangerous Idea}}. Evolution is an [[algorithm]]ic process. It is, in its most abstract sense, a manipulation of symbolic logic. And isn’t this | But, hold on: this is, as [[Daniel Dennett]] articulates it, {br|Darwin’s Dangerous Idea}}. Evolution is an [[algorithm]]ic process. It is, in its most abstract sense, a manipulation of symbolic logic. And isn’t this ''exactly'' what a symbolic language does? It operates on a [[Metaphor|figurative]] level: it injects meaning independent of the substrate in which it is articulated, without the need for any physical causal intervention? Thermodynamics are irrelevant to the conveyance of a meaning which itself undoubtedly changes the physical universe. A new organism is created. | ||
''This non-material intellectual structure has a direct causal effect on the physical world.'' | |||
To analyse a [[Turing machine]] in purely thermodynamic terms (in terms of its total transfer of energy while physically operating) is to miss ''everything important about the Turing machine''. | |||
The heat energy of a sentence is not what is meaningful about a sentence, that is to say. | |||
Take Hamlet’s phrase: “[[There’s the rub|The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune]]”. It has less physical energy content — at the limit, less total ''information'' content — than the paragraphs that precede it in this article. | |||
Any research program that stops there — as materialism does — has missed a pretty big part of the picture. | But it doesn’t, does it? Those seven words are ''far'' richer, more meaningful and more culturally significant than the entire content of this wiki: at last count, {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} articles containing tens of thousands of lines of pompous, deluded text.<ref>Oh but [[paradox]]: This wiki contains — ''twice'' — the expression “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” — ''three times now!'' — so does that mean it has falsified itself? We think not. Because — ''context''.</ref> | ||
Any research program that stops there — as materialism does — has missed a pretty big part of the picture. In any case an eliminative materialist position, that says brain states are | |||