Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

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.

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.

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.