Caledonian2 comments on Thou Art Physics - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 June 2008 06:37AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (86)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Caledonian2 08 June 2008 03:20:00AM 3 points [-]

Supposedly one can now be a materialist and hold that the mind is software instantiated on the hardware of the brain. That's an extremely useful premise if you're a philosopher or a psychologist who doesn't want to crack open a biology textbook.

But computer programmers don't need to understand the hardware, either. Do you think they crack open metallurgy, electronics, and applied physics textbooks to accomplish their goals?

If you don't need to understand every level of hardware to manipulate electronic computational devices, why do you think anyone would need to understand the physics all the way down to deal with the mind?

It's not dualism. It's just a distinction between levels of implementation.