Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[The Grand Nudger]

There's no such thing as an inscrutible computer.  You can -always- isolate your way to every function and reverse engineer it.  It;s only a matter of time.  For a human computer (if we are such a thing) this isn;t the case.  The sort of things you'd have to do (to re a brain like we might re a board) would be unethical and murderous.

In theory you can, but when you have to carefully trace a trillion connections, you are likely to reach the end of the universe before you can process say what it's like to listen to a good song.

That seems like an exaggeration.  No one said it was easy, or could be done in a jiffy, ofc.  That's kind of the problem, atpresent. It wouldn;t be easy to do if it were a pc that no one gave a shit about.....but it;s not, it;s a living human beings brain we;d need to jack around with. The failures of our current theories of mind are not, primarily, philosophical. They withstand the test of rational scrutiny, which is the test you would apply. They;re sufficient. Whether or not they are accurate is another question entirely. Might not be.

And that's just if you treat neurons as black boxes.  As Mathilda was saying, a single neuron is immensely complex.  Just seeing which neurons happen to fire isn't even getting the whole picture.  You have the reuptake of neurotransmitters, complex interactions with hormones, fluctuations in chemistry as the brain pumps. . . probably more complexity in a single moment of a single brain than all our computers have calculated, ever.

-and knowing all of that...and seeing what the primitive shit we have for computational architectures can do, you don't think that this is, at least, a candidate for an accounting of our experience?  It's all just assumptions?  No observations, no conclusions, no knowledge, no real science?  

My point is at the end, you never really get to look the whole process in the face.  You have to reduce it, symbolize it, describe it mathematically-- and risk losing the essence of mind due to problems with degrees of precision etc.

I doubt that we'll ever know anything to the zero point of accuracy, scientifically or otherwise....this is hardly a criticism of any specific position.  Again, it seems to me, that your issue is not with materialism even as it relates to mind, but with knowledge itself.