Re: Science, God, and Free Will

On Oct 11, 1:40 am, Vend <ven...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 10 Ott, 10:34, part...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:





On Oct 9, 10:43 pm, Ernest Major <{$t...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In message <1191960416.114721.255...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
part...@xxxxxxxxx writes

Come on. Transistor can process information (what cannot?). FPA is
just a bunch of information processing, so it makes sense to assume
that a lot of transistors will be able to do the job. However, a blue
page doesn't show ANY ability to reflect red light, so there's no
reason to assume that 10^18 of them will. Electrons don't have a 'small
mind' which can be additive - they seem to be completely undefined in
mental terms. I hope you don't think that the fallacy of composition
means that 0+0+0+0+....+0=0 is wrong.

I hadn't realised that you were seriously proposing the "usual argument
for Dualism" above - instead I thought that you were parodying a Dualist
argument.

It *is* a fallacy to argue that a system cannot have a property that
it's components don't have. Atoms have properties that protons and
electrons don't have. Molecules have properties that atoms don't have.
And so on up to brains. Or hurricanes. Or stars.

(The fallacy of composition is the claim that components necessarily
display the same properties as the systems that the compose.)

I think I made the difference clear. So I'll try again. The fallacy
of composition is essensially a linguistic fallacy. See, we assume
that an electron can interact with a red photon. We conclude that a
bunch of electrons can interact with a bunch of photons. That is, if
this bunch of photons hits our surface, it will be reflected. No
fallacy here - and no argument yet. But now we come with a new word,
and we say a 'beam of photons' hit the surface. We argue that no
single electron can reflect a 'beam', and conclude that the 'beam'
won't be reflected by any number of electrons. That's the fallacy. It
was introduced beacuse we used the new word 'beam' instead of 'a lot
of single interactions'. Likewise, a hurricane can destroy a house. A
single atom can't. It doesn't mean the hurricane can't be composed of
atoms, because, really, 'destroying a house' is just a new word for 'a
lot of atom-atom interactions', and every single atom is capable of
that.

In short, every action a (material) composition can take, can be
shown to be composed of a lot of smaller scale actions, when each one
is taken care of by a part of the composition (or maybe one part of it
does everything). Or every property is composed of smaller properties
(every girder donates something to the tower's height - clearly a
girder, by itself, isn't a tower). So we require (a) that the property
is dividable, and (b) the properties of the elements are additive.

Bad analogy.
Girders have height as do towers. Height is not the emergent property
in this case.
'Towerness' is the emergent property, and there is no way I know of
dividing 'towerness' among girders, its a property they just don't
have.

I addressed it in subsequent posts to Ernest. Basically 'towerness'
is a shortname for certain height, mass, color, shape, whatever -
every single girder contibutes o some or all of these properties. Your
ability to invent short names for long definitions doesn't make the
property emergent.

Now consider my examples - if a simgle atom can't reflect red light
(beacuse its resonanse lines are somewhere else), then any number of
them can't. It's just not additive. A neutron doesn't have a charge -
so 10^18 neutrons are just the same. And so on. Electrons just don't
have emotions at all - they're undefinable and undescribable in mental
terms. So so will be any number of them. Unless of course you can
describle self-awareness in terms of position, momentum, charge
etc.... let me know if you think you can.

Isn't "emotion" just a shorthand for a certain kind of atom
interactions?

That's the famous Materialistic assumption you're all try to
prove... prove it and I'll take back the argument.

Basically a hurricane has no properties an atom dones't have - it
has position, speed, angular momentum - and so does the atom. Every
property of the hurricane can be shown to exist in its components
(although in a smaller quantity). Unless of course you use the
linguistic trick again.

Processes running on your computer have no position, speed or angular
momentum.
Does that mean that your computer is not made of atoms?


Again, 'process' is a name you use for certain electron patters.
Each of them has these properties (it may not be completely defined in
the 'process' definition, as a single process may match more than one
electron pattern. It doesn't matter). A pattern is only the sum of its
elements. You may assign more importance to vertain patters, but this
importance exists in your mind, not in the computer. It doesn't
differ, nor care.


There *are* reasons to think that a suitably arranged collection of
protons and electrons are capable of displaying self-awareness and
volition. Apart from Occam's Razor - why introduce an additional entity

Care to specify these reasons?

before a need for it has been demonstrated - there is evidence that the
qualities are material, such as the effects of drugs, blows to the head,
neurological damage, etc. I find it a reasonable working hypothesis that
consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.

As I discussed in length in former posts, the mutual causual
interaction of the mental and material is the assertion of dualism,
and can in no way to used as an evidence against it. It's also
acknowledged by all types of monism (I think) - only that it asserts
that the 'mental' is a strange type of 'material', or vice versa.

--
alias Ernest Major- Hide quoted text -

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