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If philosophy is mathematics and mathematics is computation, can I conclude that philosophy is computation?
Yes.
So is philosophy merely computation?
No because philosophy isn't mathematics and mathematics isn't computation.
Can we axiomatize philosophy?
If you want. Getting philosophers to agree on a set of axioms should be amusing.
Can a ...
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Apparently, "grounding" is a new word of choice in metaphysical debates, there was a philosophical Conference on Grounding and Emergence held in Glasgow last May. This is a reaction to fading hopes of reducing sciences to more fundamental ones and ultimately to physics, which was the original programme of scientific realism, known as reductionism or ...
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The assertion that complex statements are reducible to statements about particulars standing in logical relations to one another is associated with logical atomism and the philosophical method of analysis popularized by Bertrand Russell, Moore and the early Wittgenstein. The doctrine is both metaphysical and methodological.
Metaphysically, logical atomism ...
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In his "Lecture on Ethics" Wittgenstein makes some similar points about wonder and miracles, first defining miracles:
Let me first consider, again, our first experience of wondering at the existence of the world and let me describe it in a slightly different way; we all know what in ordinary life would be called a miracle. It obviously is simply an event ...
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Emergence and reductionism aren't generally considered to be opposite concepts, though they are related and sometimes conflict. There are quite a few academics which fall into one camp or another and they occasionally raise their voices to each other. However, philosophy and science is undergoing something of a technocratic revolution. In many journals, one ...
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There is a view known as "reductionism" which is often attributed to the Vienna Circle. The strictest form of the view (which is the one most attributable to the Vienna Circle) is that non-reductive statements are in some sense meaningless.
From the paper you have linked though, I think you may be asking about a weaker form of reductionism:
The workings ...
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For emergentists, the problem with reductionism is not in theorizing the reduction, it is in imagining that you can understand the original by looking at the reduced form.
You can easily reduce all of life to chemistry, but you will fail to understand reproduction or other goal-driven behaviors. The concept of the will to survive probably has a hormonal ...
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You are talking not about science but the faith of determinism.
In the deterministic mindset, everything is made up merely of the physical interaction of objects, which can be subjected to experiments, which will definitively show how they behave and why.
The true statement should be, the physical world can be approximated to rules that consistently are ...
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According to Chalmers the answer is no, CTD does not entail reductionism; he believes both that the brain is computable and that consciousness is emergent.
in Strong and Weak Emergence he writes:
I think there is exactly one clear
case of a strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of consciousness.
and in A Computational Foundation for ...
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I've found what I was looking for. In response to one of the commentors, I reviewed Brian Green's The Hidden Reality which had prompted my thinking on this concept recently. I found right in the text the name I sought, complete with its own wikipedia entry: Max Tegmark's "Mathematical Universe Hypothesis". This is a great starting point for me, but I'd ...
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SCIENCE AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE ARE DIFFERENT ...
In aesthetic contemplation one considers an object - a natural object or an artefact - in detachment from all practical or explanatory motivations or attitudes. The object may be regarded purely as a presentation or an exercise in symbolism, or as embodying certain techniques. The response may be an ...
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My view may be idiosyncratic so watch out, but to me emergentism and reductionism would be the same thing. It would because things emerge that they are reducible. Those who say say consciousness emerges with physical complexity are saying that consciousness can be reduced to the physical.
After all, if a phenomena is not emergent and reducible then it must ...
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Reductionism is an important strategy in Science. Its paramount exemplar being physics. However its not the only one. But because of the prestige of Physics the scientific method is often conflated with reductionism.
With that understood, one can see why anti-reductionism can be seen as being anti scientific method. In reality it shows the epistemological ...
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There are chemical processes in the fruit, a bit crudely it's just atoms “moving around”
If you really want to keep a strict separation of Being and Non-Being, movement is also contradictory. For the movement of an object from point A to B involves a transition from Being to Non-Being at point A, and from Non-Being to Being at B.
If we focus at point A, we ...
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The key question here is “Can a computer think for us?” This can be reformulated as “Will strong AI ever be realized?” Or, “Can human understanding be reduced to a program running on a Turing machine?”
There are two answers: Yes or No.
If Yes, then a program can produce human understanding. Since philosophy is the result of human understanding, ...
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Antireductionism is a scientific position, it fits the mathematical results encountered in places like chaotic dynamics. However much you simplify an explanation, if there are feedback loops and other interactions involved, you cannot actually foresee the real outcome of the simplified system at certain levels of detail. So even if you have given a most ...
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The mistake is to see explantory layers as incompatible or competing.
In evolution theory, it has been understood for a long time that the gene is the fundamental level of selection, and kin-selection theories and of group selection coming to dominate over individual selection have been dismissed. But what is now increasingly accepted, is that evolution ...
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"The question is: Is Dawkins correct in believing that reductionism should not stand in conflict with our sense of wonder and awe?"
I would say he is exactly right. But he seems to have no idea of how wonderful and awesome the universe is. He is a materialist and cannot imagine anything more wonderful or awesome than atoms in a void.
In the end, if we ...
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It depends how much goes into the emergent properties as regards the kind of causal power (if any) they possess. I'm going to take part of an argument from J. Kim. It doesn't represent his full view but the premises are relevant, I think, to what you are asking.
(1) Emergent mental properties are real properties (the thesis of emergent
realism).
(...
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I think that some people would prefer if antireductionism was a scientific position. Then they could account for irreducible things without denying materialism.
Others (including Stephen Jay Gould and his "non-overlapping magesteria" and Karl Popper) are perfectly happy to think that science is reductionistic, because they acknowledge the irreducible things ...
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A couple points:
It's not clear what a scientific position is. So let's replace 'position' with 'theory' so that the discussion is clearer.
Requiring that a scientific theory not contradict any other scientific theory is definitely not a criterion of science. If it were, we would be in really bad shape. New theories always contradict those they replace. ...
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Regarding mathematics~computation, as @rus9384 says in his comment below your question, "...mathematics is not computation, devising theories is not computation." So your premise is ab initio wrong. But it's partly right -- mathematical proofs >>are<< computation, by the Curry-Howard isomorphism, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%...
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It depends on whether you are a realist about mental objects. If you believe that only the physical is real, then the purely mental is not, by definition. But mental realism is not unheard of --many mathematicians, for instance, still hew to the Platonic idea that things like numbers have a real existence as mental entities independent of human observers.
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If one is looking at physically emergent properties, then it should be reasonable to assume that that property can be defined by looking at the state of an object. We may not be able to specify a formal string defining that property, but we can accept that there is one or else we have to revisit what a physical property means. This definition explicitly ...
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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is reducible to the same set of letters, spaces and punctuation marks as The Complete Tweets of Paris Hilton. No understanding of those fundamental letters explains the difference between the two. The meaning emerges at a higher level of organization, it is embodied at the lowest level but not explained by it.
Is ...
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I don't see why not: must materialism entail determinism? One can still believe in only a natural world, without believing in spiritual substances of one kind or another whilst accepting indeterminism.
One could conceivably gesture towards the principle of plenitude, in that if Nature can in some ways be determined, then in other ways she is indetermined; ...
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Logical positivists are reductionists, but there are different forms of reductionism.
Ontological reductionism says that everything reduces to a physical base, epistemuc reductionism days that higher level theories are reducible to physical theories, but the version entertained by logical positivists is semantic reductionism: a reduction of meaning to a ...
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Logical Positivism assigns meaningfulness to thoughts based on their empirical verifiability. Reductionism is typically phrased as the declaration that everything is matter, bound by natural laws. The two can be thought of orthogonally.
Logicial Positivism can recognize that a thought could be meaningless, and still be a thought. Attempting to prove or ...
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There are several meanings for "reductionism" that people apply. However, in philosophy "reductionism" typically means "ontological reductionism," the idea that A is B. For this particular meaning, computational complexity does not figure into their thinking. Either A reduces to B, or it doesn't (such as if the reduction would require a computational ...
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I am purposely going to avoid discussing the mind, and focus directly on the notion of emergentism per se, because I think that avoids biases and allows one to be clearer. The analogies to computation and the mind should be easily made.
There is no absolutely non-reductivist form of emergentism. Emergentism does not deny reducibility, it accepts the fact ...
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