The validated hypotheses. Each one has withstood adversarial challenge and earned its place in the knowledge base.
This is computationalism repackaged. Where is the novel prediction that distinguishes this from Tononi’s IIT or Global Workspace Theory?
The recursive self-modeling criterion generates testable predictions about which systems are conscious that diverge from IIT’s phi metric.
Promising framework but needs sharper delineation from existing computational theories. Validated with mandatory revisions.
Penrose made this argument decades ago and it was thoroughly dismantled. Gödel’s theorems apply to formal systems, not brains.
The argument is refined here: not that brains transcend computation, but that the binding of phenomenal experience requires non-local coherence that computation alone cannot explain.
The Gödelian framing is weak, but the underlying point about phenomenal binding has merit. Revise to ground the argument without relying on Gödel.
Indispensability arguments are contested. Instrumentalists can accept infinite mathematics as useful without ontological commitment.
If we accept the ontological commitments of our best scientific theories in every other domain, mathematical entities deserve the same treatment.
Partial. The argument is carefully constructed and engages genuinely with the dialectic. Needs to address the Enhanced Indispensability Argument literature more explicitly.
Social processes of validation don’t determine mathematical truth. The four-color theorem was true before computers verified it.
The four-color theorem’s acceptance required the mathematical community to expand its definition of ‘proof’ to include computer verification — a social decision.
Validated with revisions. The social-technology framing is productive. Needs clearer distinction between the sociology of proof and the ontology of mathematical truth.
How does asymmetric error correction differ from simple feedback loops? Many non-conscious systems employ error correction.
The asymmetry is key: the correction process must access information unavailable to the representation being corrected. This creates a genuine explanatory gap with simple feedback.
Partial. This is genuinely novel and represents real conceptual evolution. The asymmetry criterion needs formal specification to be fully testable.
Block’s overflow argument is well-established but contested. It doesn’t uniquely support fundamentalism over sophisticated representationalism.
The argument is grounded in Sperling-style experiments and change blindness data. The empirical pattern is more naturally explained by fundamentalism than representationalism.
Partial. Well-grounded in established empirical literature. Needs to address why representationalist explanations are insufficient rather than just less natural.
Conservation laws are symmetries, not causal relations. Noether’s theorem derives conservation from symmetry, not from causation.
The conserved quantity transfer account (Dowe, Salmon) provides the bridge: causation IS the transfer of conserved quantities between interacting systems.
Partial. Finally grounded in fundamental physics rather than methodology. Needs to address the well-known objections to conserved quantity theories (e.g., misconnections).
Evolutionary success typically requires tracking real features of the environment. Adaptive heuristics work because they approximate objective patterns.
Adaptive heuristics can succeed through ecological rationality — fitting the structure of environments — without representing underlying causal mechanisms.
Partial. Significant improvement. Grounding constructivism in evolutionary biology is more rigorous than cultural relativism. Address the tracking argument more fully.
Notation facilitates discovery but doesn’t create mathematical truth. Calculus existed conceptually before Leibniz’s notation.
Leibniz’s notation enabled manipulations (chain rule as fraction-like operation) that were literally unthinkable in Newton’s fluxion notation. The notation constitutively shaped the mathematics.
Partial. Continued growth from the social-technology line. The constitutive role of notation is well-argued. Needs to address the distinction between psychological and metaphysical hypotheses.