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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any chaotic system (highly sensitive to initial conditions) is practically uncomputable for us, because we have neither the computational power nor the ability to measure the initial conditions sufficiently accurately. Whether there is some lowest level at which everything is quantized, or it's real numbers all the way down, is an open question.
I don't think your argument will seem compelling to anyone who doesn't already have a strong prior belief that the mind is non-physical.
I would argue it is the other way around. If people are truly unbiased whether we are computable or not, then they would give my argument consideration. It is those with a priori computational bias that will not be phased by what I say.
You're right, but people tend to have strong priors one way of the other, often unconsciously. This is one of those classic cases where people with strong, divergent priors will disagree more strongly after seeing the same evidence. So if you want to convince people you'll have to try harder than most to find common ground.
And that's why I'm not concerned with convincing anyone. The proof is in the pudding. If I'm right, I should be able to get results. If not, then my argument doesn't matter.
> 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.