RE: Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"
September 29, 2016 at 7:07 pm
(This post was last modified: September 29, 2016 at 7:09 pm by bennyboy.)
@OP (sorry if I missed a couple pages of chat)
To be frank, I don't think the science of mind is really science at all. Science is a process of physical observation, collecting information, and drawing inferences into theory. However, the science of mind faces a REALLY nasty problem-- you can't observe mind. The solution? Say mind is brain function, and then observe the shit out of the brain. But this obviously begs the question in a particularly unprofessional way. It would be akin to saying, "We all know that God is the Sun, so when we study it, we are studying the sun." The "science of mind" is really the "science of correlates I've already decided to accept as mind." It's not useful, for example, in determining whether a non-organic-brain system does/doesn't have the ability to experience the Universe via qualia.
Theories like information theory, etc., I consider as PHILOSOPHICAL positions, rather than scientific ones.
To be frank, I don't think the science of mind is really science at all. Science is a process of physical observation, collecting information, and drawing inferences into theory. However, the science of mind faces a REALLY nasty problem-- you can't observe mind. The solution? Say mind is brain function, and then observe the shit out of the brain. But this obviously begs the question in a particularly unprofessional way. It would be akin to saying, "We all know that God is the Sun, so when we study it, we are studying the sun." The "science of mind" is really the "science of correlates I've already decided to accept as mind." It's not useful, for example, in determining whether a non-organic-brain system does/doesn't have the ability to experience the Universe via qualia.
Theories like information theory, etc., I consider as PHILOSOPHICAL positions, rather than scientific ones.
