Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[The Grand Nudger]

No, but you seem to strongly feel that it's even theoretically possible.

Because it is, by definition, as a computational architecture.  Isolating it's components will inexorably yield it's functions.  That's how the systems -work- too. If you couldn't do this theoretically possible thing, the computational architecture would be incapable of computation.

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.

You can never encapsulate them all from a materialist paradigm, from an idealist paradigm, or from either?  Because if it's the latter, it's not relevant, and no objection to materialism, even as it relates to mind.

-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.

So it's science right up and to the point where it begins to be impossible for you to maintain your objections, then..it ceases to be science.  How convenient.  

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.

-and finding no traction elsewhere, we pivot back round to this. Sorry, our best evidence isn't an assumption, it's a collection of observations all telling us the same thing. Brain accounts for what we know of mind. For what we don't know of mind, brain is a rational inference based upon sound propositions, and valid argumentation. It has helped, ofc, that we've come around to this new notion of mind with science as our proposition generating tool, rather than superstition or the endless babble of the last thousand years worth of believers in strange shit a, b, or c.