Wright Runs Away -- Then Came Back
09/14/19 01:25 PM Filed in: Philosophy | Bad Arguments
Update 9/17 @ 11:15am: This morning I looked to see if there had been any more comments on the below referenced post and I saw that my comment, which had been deleted, was now present. So I retract the statement that Wright ran away. Still, if he would only attempt to show me where I'm wrong in my argument...
Over the years I've had several fruitless, yet generally polite, arguments[1] with author, philosopher, and theist John Wright. Fruitless, because neither of us is swayed by the other's arguments. I remain fully convinced that some of his arguments are wrong, even if some of his conclusions happen to be right. Polite, because we stick to the arguments.
But, yesterday, in Wright's Parable of the Adding Machine, he deleted a response that I made to him.
My initial response. His response. Here is the reply he deleted:
It isn't clear to me why Wright deleted this response. He's certainly free to do whatever he wants with his blog, but I didn't violate any of his conditions for posting. My guess is that this left him with a challenge he couldn't rebut. Wright very much wants to prove that immaterial things exist. That's easy. But he also wants to prove that they exist apart from material things. That's hard. It may be impossible to prove either way. What my response showed is that arithmetic is based on simple physical operations. Add a rock to a pail. Remove a rock from a pail. Determine if a pail is empty. Do something if a pail is empty otherwise do something else. These actions give you addition, subtraction, multiplication, and exponentiation over the non-negative integers. Attach labels to these actions and you have elementary arithmetic. Attach labels to collections of labels and you have shortcuts that hide a tremendous amount of physical activity. Wright doesn't know how to sever the ideas of math (which are basically just "potential actions," not unlike a high jumper who looks where he's going to make each step on his approach to jumping over the bar before he actually does it). This argument supports the idea that math is "matter in motion in certain patterns," which Wright very much does not want to be true.
This explains why, in a previous discussion, Wright was so opposed to the following observation about Euclidean geometry, by Marvin Jay Greenberg, from Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries:
This challenged his assertion that Euclidean geometry was purely non-physical.
Am I right as to why he deleted my post? I may never know, because he avoided the challenge.
A partial catalog of discussions with Wright:
Over the years I've had several fruitless, yet generally polite, arguments[1] with author, philosopher, and theist John Wright. Fruitless, because neither of us is swayed by the other's arguments. I remain fully convinced that some of his arguments are wrong, even if some of his conclusions happen to be right. Polite, because we stick to the arguments.
But, yesterday, in Wright's Parable of the Adding Machine, he deleted a response that I made to him.
My initial response. His response. Here is the reply he deleted:
A stopsign written in Chinese only means STOP to someone who reads Chinese.Drop me in the middle of China and I'll tell you which sign means "stop" after watching how the Chinese behave around them.
[The symbols] must follow arithmetic rules.Sure. But the rules are labels for behaviors. Show me the behaviors and I'll tell you what the symbols mean.
The behavior of the gear train is a thoughtless therefore blind and meaningless motion of bit of matter in reaction to a clerk pressing a lever.The behavior follows a pattern, a pattern which is the same as that performed with stones and pails. Since we've given labels to the latter behaviors, because the behavior of the machine matches that pattern, we can use the same labels.
... because the form of both the clerks calculation and the gears' motion share the same formSo you agree with the first sentence of the prior blockquote. Do you disagree with the second sentence? If so, why?
But the machine cannot count.It implements the successor function for a finite set of numbers. The behavior is what matters.
It is not alive.Define "alive". Is a virus alive?
The same symbols written in a different order on another part of the machine, or on a piece of paper, would have no meaning at allSure, if they can't be associated with behavior. But, just like watching Chinese behavior around a Chinese stop sign to learn what 停 means, if I could watch the behavior of whatever made the marks, I might be able to learn what they mean. Or find a Rosetta stone, which is just a shortcut for the same thing.
It isn't clear to me why Wright deleted this response. He's certainly free to do whatever he wants with his blog, but I didn't violate any of his conditions for posting. My guess is that this left him with a challenge he couldn't rebut. Wright very much wants to prove that immaterial things exist. That's easy. But he also wants to prove that they exist apart from material things. That's hard. It may be impossible to prove either way. What my response showed is that arithmetic is based on simple physical operations. Add a rock to a pail. Remove a rock from a pail. Determine if a pail is empty. Do something if a pail is empty otherwise do something else. These actions give you addition, subtraction, multiplication, and exponentiation over the non-negative integers. Attach labels to these actions and you have elementary arithmetic. Attach labels to collections of labels and you have shortcuts that hide a tremendous amount of physical activity. Wright doesn't know how to sever the ideas of math (which are basically just "potential actions," not unlike a high jumper who looks where he's going to make each step on his approach to jumping over the bar before he actually does it). This argument supports the idea that math is "matter in motion in certain patterns," which Wright very much does not want to be true.
This explains why, in a previous discussion, Wright was so opposed to the following observation about Euclidean geometry, by Marvin Jay Greenberg, from Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries:
Ancient geometry was actually a collection of rule-of-thumb procedures arrived at through experimentation, observation of analogies, guessing, and occasional flashes of intuition. In short, it was an empirical subject in which approximate answers were usually sufficient for practical purposes.
This challenged his assertion that Euclidean geometry was purely non-physical.
Am I right as to why he deleted my post? I may never know, because he avoided the challenge.
A partial catalog of discussions with Wright:
Date Title 9/8/2010 Dialog With An Adding Machine 1/26/2011 Materialism, Theism, and Information 3/24/2011 Taking Ideas Seriously 4/16/2011 Bad Arguments Against Materialism 5/8/2012 My Instinct is to say the Morality is not Instinctive 4/29/2014 The Cosmic Chessboard, or, ONCE MORE FOR OLD TIMES SAKE! 12/15/2014 When Wright Is Wrong 5/17/2015 The Notorious Meat Robot Letters – Expanded! 5/16/2015 Man Is The Animal... 5/8/2019 No Metaphysics, No Physics
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