RE: Applicability of Maths to the Universe
June 13, 2020 at 8:29 am
(This post was last modified: June 13, 2020 at 8:45 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Penrose and Popper, both, were committed and vocal materialists. You're reading what you believe into the things they wrote.
Three worlds is not a dualist conjecture. It's the observation that these three categories - the world as it is, how we experience the world, and what we know about the world, are not equivalent. It's a useful conjecture in that world three, of which science is a representative subject, is not necessarily equivalent to world one, the world as it is. The aim was to improve world three, so that it might be closer to world one.
In that context, it works. However, in the context of mind, it doesn't. Our brains are a representative of world one, our experience is a product of that brain, and what we know (or think we know) is a consequence of that experience. Penrose's contention is not that mind is immaterial in any way shape or form. It's that classical physics and computation might not be able to explain how our brains work, that we need a better understanding of the quantum world for that.
If you insist on making these constant appeals to authority, then it might help to pick an authority that actually does express the argument that you're trying to make.
Three worlds is not a dualist conjecture. It's the observation that these three categories - the world as it is, how we experience the world, and what we know about the world, are not equivalent. It's a useful conjecture in that world three, of which science is a representative subject, is not necessarily equivalent to world one, the world as it is. The aim was to improve world three, so that it might be closer to world one.
In that context, it works. However, in the context of mind, it doesn't. Our brains are a representative of world one, our experience is a product of that brain, and what we know (or think we know) is a consequence of that experience. Penrose's contention is not that mind is immaterial in any way shape or form. It's that classical physics and computation might not be able to explain how our brains work, that we need a better understanding of the quantum world for that.
If you insist on making these constant appeals to authority, then it might help to pick an authority that actually does express the argument that you're trying to make.
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