Date post: | 31-Mar-2015 |
Category: |
Documents |
Upload: | ulises-grantham |
View: | 220 times |
Download: | 1 times |
A New Kind of Dualism
David BanachDepartment of Philosophy
St. Anselm College
Plato’s Timaeus(48e-56c )
1. Way of Reason: Mind. Orders things for the best.A.Internal principle of Change. B.Works by persuasion, the presentation of attractive modes of being.
2. The Way of Necessity. Blind Matter constrained by its
form. A. Must have a medium: the Receptacle B. Must have a external cause of its being and initial
conditions: The Demiurge or nursemaid. C. Must have external rule that govern the relationships
between its elements. D. Action is necessitated by the formal relations of the
elements and their medium.
Plato’s Primal Triangles
Platonic Solids
A Mechanical Theory of the Elements
The Rules Of Life (1) An unoccupied cell surrounded by
exactly three filled cells will become full or alive
(2) A full or live cell surrounded by either two or three live cells remains alive
(3) A live cell surrounded by more than three live cells dies, or becomes empty.
More Life Resources
dbanach.com\life
1-5 Pixel Patterns
Random Pixels
Stable Life Patterns
Oscillating Patterns
Gliders
Acorn
Breeder
A Turing Machine in the Life World
The Life World as Model of the Physical World
Element of the Life world Element of Physical Reality it represents Pixels (Functional Representations in CPU)
Fundamental Particles The Physical World
Program Fundamental Laws of Nature Computer (and the rest of the world) Primal Reality that underlies our physical
reality Large sustainable patterns of pixels Physical objects Meta-regularities or side effects of the program.
Observable regularities of macroscopic objects.
Screen/Keyboard/Agent Input/Output module
Mind
Lessons from The Game of Life
1. Another primal level of Reality is necessary 2. The Primal Reality cannot itself work through the way of
Necessity. It can’t be Mechanisms all the way down. 3. The Primal Reality, the actual causal implementation of
the rules, may be unknowable, given substrate neutrality of form.
4. Most of the observed regularities will not be real. That is they will not be the actual rules running on the medium that actually cause the course of events. They will be meta-regularities, or side effects of the operation of the rules.
5. Every Physical object and process also has its correlate in the Primal Reality, which may have other properties on the primal level.
A Virtual Pixel
Levels of Reality
Pixels
CPU
Agent
Output
Input
Physical Reality
Primal Reality
I/O Module
Mind and Body
Physical Reality
Primal Reality
I/O Module
Default Primal Reality(Part of PR running program)
BrainI/O Interface
=I/O Device=Mind
It’s NEW!!!! Not a Substance Dualism: Body not a
substance. Not a Property Dualism or Dual Aspect
Theory: Mind and Body are NOT the same thing as existing in the two different realms.
Not an Identity Theory or Physicalism. No Emergence, Supervenience, or
Epiphenomenalism.
It’s IMPROVED!!! Interaction of Mind and Body a natural
result of the theory. Explains the essential Intentionality of
mental states. Explains why Consciousness should be a
mystery while making it a part of (primal) Nature.
Has some empirical, research guiding, implications.
Conclusions
Mechanism implies a new kind of Dualism.
We may need a New Kind of Materialism. Mechanism, by its very nature, is limited in its explanatory power.