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Jonathan_Graehl comments on Three consistent positions for computationalists - Less Wrong
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Comments (176)
You've missed a major position: that the entire idea of "substrate independence" is a red herring. Detecting the similarity of two patterns is something that happens in your brain, not something that's part of reality.
This whole thing, AFAICT, is an attempt to have an argument war, rather than an attempt to understand/find truth. It is possible that no position on this subject makes any sense whatsoever, for example.
Or, to put it another way, failure to offer a coherent refutation of an incoherent hypothesis doesn't represent evidence for the incoherent hypothesis.
Could you edit this? I can't decipher it.
[eta: Cyan and Pavitra have come up with nice obviously-true statements that are textually similar to the original bungled sentence and similar in meaning, but I can't be sure of what you meant.]
Sorry, that was a messed up edit - I was at first writing "doesn't represent evidence for incoherence" and then messed up the edit to "doesn't represent evidence for the incoherent hypothesis".
More colloquially, if somebody can't coherently answer your incoherent question, it doesn't mean that the viewpoint which created the question is therefore sensible or true.
How about, "If I offer a not-even-wrong refutation of your not-even-wrong hypothesis, you can't take the not-even-wrongness of the refutation as evidence for the hypothesis."
I read it to mean that once one has demonstrated a hypothesis to be incoherent, one does not then also need to demonstrate it to be false.