🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep30.155837.4398@guinness.idbsu.edu>,
holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:

>The facts about "qualia" translate exactly to facts about physical
>states of the brain; there is no need to maintain that there are
>any additional facts, as opposed to additional sentences. The
>additional questions you ask about qualia seem to me (and my qualia
>have the same structure as yours, on the whole...) to be
>pseudo-questions.  I think that the only thing which we can
>"understand" about anything is its structure; qualia and
>the brain states have precisely correlated structures and identical
>"causal" relationships with the world, so I see no reason to doubt
>that they are in fact the same.

I don't agree that facts being perfectly correlated implies that they
are the same facts. If that were the case, how could talk about
isomorphism between structures make any sense? Or perhaps you believe
isomorphism *is* identity?

For example, suppose that a perfect, complete, deterministic theory of
physics is developed. (There may never be such a theory, but it is
conceivable.) What this would mean is the development of a
mathematical structure, together with a correspondence between aspects
of the structure and aspects of the physical world, such that every
fact about the world is mirrored by a purely mathematical fact about
the structure. Does this imply that the mathematical structure *is*
the physical world? Maybe so, but that is a fairly radical position.

I also don't believe that mental states are determined by physical
states. I believe that the relationship between a mental state and the
corresponding physical state to be something like the relationship
between an algorithm and a corresponding implementation, or the
relationship between a theory and its models. I don't know whether you
would consider this a "dualist" position or not. A mental state is
compatible with a certain physical state if a correspondence can be
set up between the two such that changes to the mental are mirrored by
changes to the physical. However, there is no reason to think that
there is only one possible correspondence relation. Without specifying
the correspondence, it is not possible to determine the mental state
from the physical state.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY