[yters]

1. No I don't. I don't have to explain how gravity works to know that it does and make scientific claims about its operation. Likewise, I can scientifically demonstrate the mind is non physical and interacts with our physical world without explaining how.

2. If the world is not physically closed then physical theory and natural laws are not violated, since they would not apply to anything beyond the physical world.

3. True, but if the mind can be shown to perform physically uncomputable tasks, then we can infer the mind is not physical. In which case we can also apply Occam's razor and infer the mind is doing something uncomputable as opposed to having access to vast immaterial computational resources.

Finally, calling a position names, such as 'mystical', does nothing to determine the veracity of the position. At best it is counter productive by distracting from the logic of the argument.

[13415]

I wasn't trying to argue with you, I merely laid out what is commonly thought about the subject matter. Sorry if that sounds patronizing (it's really not meant to). Anyway, if you want to publish a paper defending a dualist position nowadays in any reputable journal, you'll have to address points 1&2 in one way or another, whether you believe you have to or not. It's not as if that problem hadn't been discussed during the past 60 years or so. There are whole journals dedicated to it.

> if the mind can be shown to perform physically uncomputable tasks

That's true. Many people have tried that and many people believe they can show it. Roger Penrose, for example. These arguments are usually based on complexity theory or the Halting Problem and involve certain views about what mathematicians can and cannot do. As I've said, I've personally not been convinced by any of those arguments.

Your mileage may differ. Fair enough. Just make sure that you do not "know the answer" already when starting to think about the problem, because that's what many people seem to do when they think about these kind of problems and it's a pity.

> calling a position names, such as 'mystical', does nothing to determine the veracity of the position. At best it is counter productive by distracting from the logic of the argument.

That wasn't my intention, I use "mystical" in this context in the sense of "does not provide any better understanding or scientifically acceptable explanation." Many of the (modern) arguments in this area are inferences to the best explanation.

By the way, correctly formulated computationalism does not presume physicalism. It is fully compatible with dualism.

[yters]

Yes, I understand computationalism does not imply physicalism, but physicalism does imply computationalism. Thus, if computationalism is empirically refuted, then physicalism is false.

I know the Lucas Godel incompleteness theorem type arguments. Whether successful or not, the counter arguments are certainly fallacious. E.g. just because I form a halting problem for myself does not mean I am not a halting oracle for uncomputable problems.

But, I have developed a more empirical approach, something that can be solved by the average person, not dealing with whether they can find the Godel sentence for a logic system.

Also, there is a lot of interesting research showing that humans are very effective at approximating solutions to NP complete problems, apparently better than the best known algorithms. While not conclusive proof in itself, such examples are very surprising if there is nothing super computational about the human mind, and less so if there is.

At any rate, there are a number of lines of evidence I'm aware of that makes the uncomputable mind a much more plausible explanation for what we see humans do, ignoring the whole problem of consciousness. I'm just concerned with empirical results, not philosophy or math. As such, I don't really care what some journal's idea of the burden of proof is. I care about making discoveries and moving our scientific knowledge and technology forward.

Additionally, this is not some academic speculation. If the uncomputable mind thesis is true, then there are technological gains to be made, such as through human in the loop approaches to computation. Arguably, that is where all the successful AI and ML is going these days, so that serves as yet one more line of evidence for the uncomputable mind thesis.

[inimino]

> physicalism does imply computationalism

That's not true either.

There are plenty of materialists who think the universe is not computable, thus it's totally possible to believe that the mind is not computable despite being entirely physical.

[yters]

It's possible, so I should qualify it as our current understanding of physics implies computationalism.

So, if a macro phenomena, i.e. the human mind, is uncomputable, then it is not emergent from the low computable physical substrate.

[inimino]

If the mind were found to be uncomputable, I think you'd find vastly more physicists would take that as evidence the universe is uncomputable than that the mind is nonphysical.

[yters]

So they may, but that would not follow logically. If the lowest level of physics is all computable then the higher physical levels must also be computable. Thus, if a higher level is not computable, it is not physical. We have never found anything at the lowest level that is not computable. None of it is even at the level of a Turing machine, unlike human produced computers.

[perl4ever]

Explaining how gravity works doesn't tell you whether gravity itself is a real thing, whether it is metaphysical, whether it's an epiphenomena of something else. People talk about it being curvature in spacetime vs. a force, but we're just reifying the math, right?

And I don't think we have a completely firm grasp on what is possible computationally with a given amount of physical resources, given the development of quantum computing.

[yters]

The metaphysics are unimportant. The important question as far as AGI is concerned is whether human intelligence is physically computable. And quantum computation is less powerful than non deterministic Turing computation. So, we can bound quantum computation with NTMs.