"andy-k" wrote in
news:NxOek.21536$Zm1.16279@newsfe27.ams2:
> I understand explanation to be different to prediction. Explanation
> entails the ability to find a place for a process or phenomenon within
> a consistent bigger picture. That bigger picture may then reveal
> previously overlooked relationships, and those revealed relationships
> may admit of predictions (thereby providing a means of empirical
> testing). So explanation doesn't necessarily entail prediction.
The trouble there is, we are inveterate, prolific, and imaginative
picture painters. There is no limit to the number of bigger pictures we
can draw around a given phenomenon. Building a larger framework around
a phenomenon, or finding a place for it within an existing larger
framework, is easy. We do it automatically (because of that innate
pattern generator). But not all of those pictures or patterns constitute
*explanations* of the phenomenon in question --- they are all only
candidate explanations until one of them permits us to make verifiable
predictions.
To be sure, a witch doctor may *believe* that a disease is caused by
evil spirits drawn to the victim by his impure thoughts. He may be
convinced his theory "explains" the disease. But until he can reliably
treat or prevent the disease by following that theory, or predict where
and when it will occur and whom it will affect, he has not explained
that disease, regardless of the depth of his conviction.
>> You don't think philosophical (metaphysical) hypotheses need be
>> testable, e.g., for consistency, coherence, and explanatory power?
> If I were to use the word 'testing' in respect of consistency,
> coherence, and explanatory power (explanatory in the sense I outline
> above), then panpsychism would be testable and would pass all the
> tests. However, I use the word 'testing' in respect of comparing
> predictions against empirical results, and in that sense panpsychism
> is an untestable hypothesis. But the emergence hypothesis is also
> untestable in that sense, so there is no way of eliminating one of
> these scenarios.
That returns us to the meaning of "explanation," per above.
>> We'll probably have to agree to disagree on that one. The mere
>> absence of evidence is not fatal (there is no evidence for a
>> hypothesis that there is life on Europa), but an hypothesis framed in
>> such a way as to exclude any possibility of evidence may be rejected
>> for that reason alone. It is simply uninformative, and thus useless.
> Then we must reject the emergence hypothsis on those grounds as well.
How does the emergence hypothesis exclude any possibility of testing, or
evidence? That hypothesis simply says, "If you assemble a system from
such-and-such components in such-and-such way, then that system will
exhibit so-and-so properties." Seems that sort of hypothesis is
eminently testable.
And if the properties predicted are of the kind for which we are willing
to impute "consciousness" to explain, then we will be entitled to impute
it to that system, on the same basis we currently have for imputing it
to other persons, animals, etc.
(You can even preserve your "instinct" here. If the system constructed
exhibits the empirical properties which rationally warrant imputing
consciousness to it, then very likely our "instinct" will tell us it is
conscious also. What did our instincts tell us about Kubrick's HAL9000?)
> It's not an article of faith to *decline* to eliminate a hypothesis in
> the absence of evidence, but it *is* an article of faith to eliminate
> a hypothesis in the absence of evidence.
We don't eliminate hypotheses merely because evidence is lacking. But we
do eliminate them *a priori* when no evidence for them is logically
possible (because they are vacuous; they supply us with no knowledge
useful in dealing with the world).
> What
> I'm saying is that conscious objects may combine in a manner that
> precipitates disordered aggregated objects that don't have a unified
> subjective perspective of their own, or in a manner that precipitates
> ordered synergistic wholes that do have a unified subjective
> perspective of their own.
But we can distinguish between those two classes of entities, correct?
