g comments on Cached Thoughts - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 October 2007 11:46PM

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Comment author: g 16 October 2007 09:43:25PM 2 points [-]

Douglas, you appear to have shifted your ground: originally you said "the explanation of cached thoughts assumes the mind and the brain are the same thing" and "I read someone unhesitatingly repeating a meme and thought", but now you say it's only your own cached thoughts that you're concerned about.

I still have no idea why you think that QM makes any difference to how much science "demands material explanations"; with the definition of "material" that you gave it never did, and with any definition of "material" broad enough to impact the idea that "the mind is the brain" QM doesn't make science any less thoroughly concerned with "material" things.

By all means flush the "material explanations only" thought out of your mental cache. But if you're replacing it with some idea that QM has done away with science's commitment to material explanations, then I bet *that* is a cached thought too, and I think it's a wrong one.