Mechanism and Matrix - a Summary

I'm going to try to succinctly explain why we can never have a unified physical theory that (even in outline) 'explains' consciousness, intentionality etc. I have argued at length that we must attribute these to interlocutors (so we can't do without them), and have also given some slightly meandering accounts of how they cannot 'emerge' from a mechanistic world view (or any pseudo-mechanistic view, involving 'spirit' or 'mental substance', which does not surreptitiously presuppose them).

A mechanistic theory of the world must be articulable. Even if we can conceive of one which is not (I don't think we can, but am prepared to be, in a sense, agnostic) such a theory could have no place in science or philosophy, since both require theorising that can be rendered in language.

To be a unifying theory, of the appropriately fundamental kind, such a theory would have (at least in outline) to point to an explanation of how our linguistic mechanisms - the sounds and 'signals' that make up our exchanges - would work. Some hierarchy from physics, through chemistry, to biology, neurology and social science might be imagined.

My argument will be that no such hierarchy can be imagined, whatever assistance is imported by way of 'emergence' or complexity.

And it turns on a very simple thought: the mechanistic theory (however complex) would have to be true. This means that it would have to incorporate a method of implementing the discrimination of one sub-set of the noises, squiggles, clacks, and semaphores which are linguistic behaviour in a way which was isomorphic with our discrimination of true assertions. This is the open question paradox as applied to the matrix world: either our capacity for truth-telling is outside the world, in which case the matrix doesn't contain the whole of our world; or our capacity for truth-telling is part of the 'matrix illusion' - in which case we cannot hope to give a 'true' account of the mechanism which underpins this illusion.

So that's it.