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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

We mean many grains of sand in a certain configuration which are also in close proximity to many molecules of water in a certain configuration†.

Do you really argue that beaches have some sort of, well, “magic”, I guess, property which makes them a beach? That seems entirely unnecessary for something as simple as beaches. You can map all the grains of sand, you can map all the molecules of water and confidently identify when something is a beach. We know how to explain beaches in terms of grains of sands and molecules of water.

We cannot yet explain all properties of brains (most notably consciousness) in terms of, say, neurons but just because we cannot yet doesn’t mean we never will.

†What those configurations are depends entirely on your definition of “beach”. Sand or water might also no play a role at all, again, depending on your definition.

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>Do you really argue that beaches have some sort of, well, “magic”, I guess, property which makes them a beach? That seems entirely unnecessary for something as simple as beaches.

And yet your caveat at the bottom illustrates that what a beach is isn't a trivial problem. Leibniz just wanted to avoid the regressive mechanical discussion by positing substances or monads as a solution to answering the question "What's a beach?". This isn't to say he's right than to say your trivialization doesn't work and that there's room for his speculation.

No, that’s just my standard “definitions are boring, let’s just agree to not discuss them”-disclaimer. Ah, well.

Definitions don’t make the problem hard. There is just no one true definition of beach, that’s fine. We can agree to use the one most commonly used or you can pick one, it doesn’t matter as long as we communicate the definition we are using.

I again and again find it astonishing that so many people have problems understanding what definitions are all about. They are about communication. Arguing about definitions is rather pointless, at least if you goal is to learn something about the world. (Good definitions make communication easier so there is room for argument about definitions but not really in this case.)

I'm not trying to defend Leibniz' argument so much as point out the space in which he can make it. I think that you may be confusing the two in responding to me as, let's be clear, Leibniz is writing in an utterly distinct intellectual environment from us. The pragmatism of communication as a standard for assessing representations does not exist in the 17th century as human cognition is still being assessed in relation to a possibility of omniscience that sometimes goes by the name of God. Communication, or inter-subjective experience, only becomes a standard after Kant. So monads or Leibniz' way of talking about substances is a way to negotiate the unique problems of conscious perception in relation to that possibility of omniscience.

>"Do you really argue that beaches have some sort of, well, “magic”, I guess, property which makes them a beach?"

I'm not sure "scientific" properties do much better for the sort of ordinary human purposes for which the property of beachness tends relevant, e.g. distribution of persons, water quality, presence of tiki bars, etc. In other words, replacing ordinary language with descriptive formalism throws the baby out with the bath water, i.e. no matter how accurate the description of neuron firings is, it will not touch upon what it is like to tuck one's child into bed at night.

Distribution of persons, water quality, presence of tiki bars – those are all equally scientific properties. Humans work with maps (or abstractions) they understand: All just a question of definitions.

No matter how accurate the description of neuron firings is, it will not touch upon what it is like to tuck one's child into bed at night.

Great strawman! I don’t think anyone ever claimed that.

It's not a strawman, because any meaningful claim of isomorphism between computers and brains depend upon there being a mappings between computer states and brain states, i.e. such claims rely upon Turing equivalency. Unless one continues to make up definitions as one goes along.

Incidentally, the claim that the distribution of Tiki Bars is normally a component of the scientific definitions of "beach" is the most patently absurd use you have made of a sophomoric definition strategy so far in this discussion.

So when you say "describing" you don't actually mean "describing", you mean "running the simulation"? That's alright then, but still leaves you with an entirely unjustified conclusion.

As to your second point, you brought Tiki bars up. I don't think Tiki bars feature prominently in the definitions of beaches in the scientific literature but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that the distribution of Tiki bars (and other properties they might have) is accessible to the scientific method. You can't claim that your definition of "beach" which apparently includes Tiki bars is not accessible to science (at least with the examples you gave for extending the definition).

>So when you say "describing" you don't actually mean "describing", you mean "running the simulation"

I mean absolutely nothing of the sort. What I am talking about is the ordinary use of the word "beach" in the ordinary grammar of the English language not its use in some game in which one attempts to translate ordinary terms with "scientific" propositions based a set of logical transformations which ignore the implications of context and connotation.

So long as one insists that the computer simulation is isomorphic to what it simulates, one is doomed to stay in the cave.

You are funny.

I found it to be quite useless to talk about the philosophy of mind to people on the internet. Either its a circle jerk because you already have the same oppinions, or you waste time talking about different things while calling each other retarded.

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