: If you substitute 'mind' for 'brain' I may be in line
: with you--just because I don't think the brain
: operates by convention any more than the heart does.
: But I'd agree that complicatedness and observability
: are not essentially linked concepts. That's what
: you're saying, right?
But as a materialist, wouldn't you hold that any conventions in the mind's operations must stem from conventions in the brain's operations?
Perhaps I should have said "idiosyncrasies" or something like that...my point was that the brain as an operating system may have certain favored types of calculations which lend themselves to processing problems via the assumption of an external world...even if an abstract, idealized computer could do more efficiently without them.
Of course, if you're arguing from a materialist point of view then you can simply say that natural selection favors creatures who believe in an external reality and therefore try harder not to get eaten--but that presupposes the existence of that reality.
: Maybe my point is better stated that, ceteris paribus,
: adding non-observables to a theory will make it less
: useful, more complicated. That's because it'll have
: more terms, and ones that aren't going to do much
: explanatory work. They are terms you're going to have
: to 'pay for'. They're not going to be 'paying for' any
: terms on their own. I don't know if you follow that
: metaphor, but the idea is that the more things your
: theory supposes, the more 'expensive' it is to adopt.
: If you add terms that explain many other terms in the
: theory, the addition had essentially 'paid for
: itself'. I can't think long about science without
: getting into metaphor.
Well, perhaps unobservables can pay for themselves in some cases. Consider the appearance of a penny. Taking purely the observables, you have an infinite set of shiny brown ovals of various sizes and widths. Assume the unobservable disc-shaped "real-world" penny, plus the unobservable properties of "viewing distance" and "viewing angle," and you can reduce that set to the combinations of just three...thingies. To use super-scientific terminology.
Sure, you can classify the set of penny-appearances without referring to a real-world penny or a real-world anything. But I'd say that once you're done classifying them in the most reasonable and natural way (for a human), you find that the elementary terms of the classification system refer to the things we think of as real-world penny, distance, angle...and since your mind is working with those terms anyway, it's no additional brain-drain to believe in their objective existence.
So maybe we just make our "external world" to hold all the elementary terms/factors/components of the classification systems we use on our mental world. It's as if--to return to my earlier crappy metaphor--our mental world is made up of polynomials, and in the process of analyzing this we create a physical world out of "(ax + b)" terms.
: ANYWAY, my point's not supposed to refute the
: point-that-may-or-may-not-be-Bertrand-Russell's, just
: point out a curiousity about it. I find it a (at least
: semi-)fascinating point, if true. That's all.
Aww...that's not a point I can argue with!
: OK, so did this really all start from the Myth Lacks an
: Apocalypse thread? Wow. I bet this is a world record
: for 'Long Jump Away from Topic'.
Check the archives...I think there may be quite a few contenders.
--SiliconDream
