🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep11.231731.7954@galois.mit.edu> tycchow@riesz.mit.edu  
(Timothy Y. Chow) writes:
> By the way, Mr. Merriman, it seems that you adhere to some sort of
> supervenience theory---that all facts about your mind rest ultimately on
> physical facts. 

I'd bet on that, sure. 

> Since this is a view held by many philosophers, perhaps
> they are not all as stupid as you seem to think.

I don't think they are stupid---I think their methodology for 
examing the _physical universe_ is flawed, dysfunctional.

You can be totally brilliant, but trapped inside a dysfunctional
way of looking at things that prevents you from making great
achievements. 

My claim has been that the scientific approach has proven its self
to be the vastly more fruitful, as far as understanding the physical 
universe. 

As for understanding complex,  human-derivative social 
entities such as ethics, justice, etc, science is not very helpful,
so far, and a philosophical approach may be fine. Though I still 
think any approach benefits from incorporating empirical information
over `thought experiments` whenever possible.

(and at the boundary between physics and social activities---i.e.
biological phenomena---there is still a struggle, but science seems
to be making steady progress.)






--
Barry Merriman
UCLA Dept. of Math
UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet; NeXTMail is welcome)