The world is a series of Partial Theories - my name for the fact that we can form a good theory of something without needing to know anything else. This links with the observation that we can form a theory of the brain without really understanding it "all".
Now my critique of materialism is the realisation when we talk about the brain that we are not just talking about some lump of nerve tissue that other people have but also something that we ourselves have and the more we attribute to that lump of matter in other people the more we have to attribute to our own piece of nerve matter up until the final material jump which is realising that our own piece of nerve tissue is what is producing my thoughts. So these thoughts I am having about my brain being the source and cause of my mental activity (from seeing to thinking to believing) are actually just the product of a lump of nerve tissue. Now that is the leap the SRH says can't happen.
However this assumes that there is a some fundamental root matter to the brain: a total theory so to speak, waiting to be uncovered; a final truth of the brain that one day we will know. Yet the world is a set of Partial Theories. The existence of Partial Theories is not what happens until you have a complete theory - it is fundamentally different from Total Theories. In a Total Theory world you know nothing until to know everything. You can't say what the weather today in UK is until you know the weather everywhere else in the world at all times in history. In a way this is true. But as I read last week in a stochastics book (linked to the stock market model being worked on at the mo), statistics is the product of this ability to isolate a system from its surroundings and see those surroundings distributed across a random variables. If we knew the positions and momentums of every particle (and sub atomic particle.... etc) in the universe then with a sufficiently large computer we could model the entire universe- but with statistics we don't need to. We just need to say that an even dice has a 1/6 chance of falling on any face and the rest of the universe randomly distributes across those 6 measures. Statistics proves that Partial Theories are possible without needing to know everything - patterns exist even within the incompletely known! In a Total Theory universe presumably we wouldn't be able to predict the outcome of any dice until we knew everything else in the universe! This would mean, like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern in the play/movie, that we could test whether we were in a Total or Partial Theory universe by repeating tosses of a coin and it not only being unpredictable but the distribution of Heads and Tails never producing any distribution - one moment seeming even and the next being all heads and then all tails and even after 1,000 tosses or 1E6 tosses neither side winning or being even or any distribution emerging. Its a bit frightening to think about that type of randomness - does it exist?
Anyway that is not how it is. The more you throw it the more likely you will have a comparable ratio of heads and tails. In other words you average out the rest of the universe and are left with just your system. A Partial Theory!
So we can form a Partial Theory of the brain. So if we are to identify ourselves with that brain which bit of the theory do we identify ourselves with? Straight from Hofstadter now: do we identify with the nerves, the networks, the electrical stimulation, the psychology, the thoughts, the dreams, the meanings etc.
So when Hofstadter refers to himself what does he mean to say that he is a brain? What does any materialist mean. What can they mean? Well actually what do they mean when they even refer to brain?
My argument against materialism is against the belief which I think materialists hold: that there is some kind of material discoverable stuff in the universe. A kind of hard "ether" out of what everything is built. A solid, definite, unquestionable stuff that acts as a root or foundation for what is true; while what is false has no such solid stuff backing it. A bit like the search for a lost jewel. When we find the jewel and hold it in our hands we know that it is real. Until that day it may just be a ghostly piece of imagination. One has material backing; the other is a myth and phantom and is not real. I think this is how materialists think. But you put a materialist in a detective role searching out the perpetrator of a political killing and they are suddenly out of their depth. They find the person who pulled the trigger and find that they were only under orders from another person who might even be the person who gives orders to the detective. Suddenly the command structure which employs them as a detective is also the one who commanded the murder and now the solidity of what they are even searching for has evaporated - and yet a murder still happened! (Old story line used many times: Sherlock Holmes in search of Jack the Ripper, JFK, Angel Heart)
What materialism can't do (obviously, surely) is give material backing to their ideas. Where is there room for ideas in Materialism?
The point is that Materialism is just a Partial Theory itself. The idea of Partial Theories must be a Partial Theory itself! The idea of Total Theories on the other hand would have to be only known once we knew everything else in the universe... (there is a simple Q.E.D. argument here: have a think when you are rested). This is getting very close to the SRH again :-) Need sleep, party 2morrow... signing off
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