Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

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.

No, but you seem to strongly feel that it's even theoretically possible. I'll state it flat out-- you can symbolize complex processes with formulae, but you can never, EVER, encapsulate all the interactions of even a simple system.

[quote  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 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?  

If I'm studying brain and behavior, I'm doing science. If I'm studying brain and subjective experience, I'm doing science-- but with the physical correlates, not the actual experience itself, to which we have no direct observational access.

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.

My issue is with the conflation of assertion with assumption. You can do science around the mind-- correlate reported feelings with brain function, or see what neurons light up when someone does a certain activity. That's all super-useful and interesting. But identifying and enumerating functional details is not equivalent to understanding whether/how/why system in the universe CAN experience.