Paper: Immaterial Aspects of Thought

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Permalink Reply by Wolf Martinus on April 7, 2009 at 3:41am

That author should go and study some basic neuroscience to get insights into the reality of the subject of his musings.
This is the sort of stuff that gives philosophy a bad name.

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Permalink Reply by Polymath on April 7, 2009 at 9:22am

As happens in almost every case of such a conclusion, the ultimate problem is in the concept of 'universals' or of 'forms'. In this case, the argument is that we *know* that certain logical arguments are *always* correct even though no material process can be certain of an infinite number of particular cases. This is connected with such philosophy of science/knowledge questions as the question of 'grue' (which is defined to be green until the year 2050, say, and blue afterwards. The question is whether a green object we see today is actually grue).

The solution, at least as I see it, it that we *define* truth as something preserved under certain rules of logic. We can then use the axioms of logic to establish that such a concept is not inconsistent. We do not 'have the entire form' of modes ponens in our mind at any time because 'forms' as such simply don't exist (this is a bad hold-over from Aristotelian philosophy) Instead, we have certain rules of logic which we can recognize as being applicable in certain situations and from which we define the term 'truth'. This is a purely typographical thing and something a Turing machine is quite capable of dealing with.

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