If the bridging laws , that explain how and why mental states arise from physical states, are left unspecified , then the complexity of the explanation cannot be assessed , so Occam’s razor doesn’t kick in. To put it another way, Occam’s razor applies to explanations, so you need to get over the bar of being merely explanatory.
What you call being hardcore about Occam’s razor seems to mean believing in the simplest possible ((something)) ,where ((something)) doesn’t have to be an explanation.
A classic example is “Why do mirrors flip left and right but not up and down?” Maxwell’s equations are a terrible explanation of this.
Maxwell’s equations are a bad intuitive explanation of reflection flipping, but you can’t deny that the intuitive explanation is implicit in Maxwell’s equations, because the alternative is that it is a physics-defying miracle.
The central issue is that a mere simple model isn’t always a good explanation by human standards—it doesn’t actually put in the explanatory work necessary to break the problem into human-understandable pieces or resolve our confusions.
What’s the equivalent of Maxwell’s equations in the mind body problem?
These inferred bridging laws can do pretty neat things. Even though they at first would seem to only work for you (there being no need to model the phenomena of other minds if we’re already modeling the atoms), we can still ask what phenomena “you” would experience if “you” were someone else, or even if you were a bat
We can ask, but as far as I know there is no answer. I have never heard of a set of laws that allow novel subjective experience to be predicted from brain states. But are your “inferred” and “would” meant to imply that they don’t?
If the bridging laws , that explain how and why mental states arise from physical states, are left unspecified , then the complexity of the explanation cannot be assessed , so Occam’s razor doesn’t kick in. To put it another way, Occam’s razor applies to explanations, so you need to get over the bar of being merely explanatory.
What you call being hardcore about Occam’s razor seems to mean believing in the simplest possible ((something)) ,where ((something)) doesn’t have to be an explanation.
Maxwell’s equations are a bad intuitive explanation of reflection flipping, but you can’t deny that the intuitive explanation is implicit in Maxwell’s equations, because the alternative is that it is a physics-defying miracle.
What’s the equivalent of Maxwell’s equations in the mind body problem?
We can ask, but as far as I know there is no answer. I have never heard of a set of laws that allow novel subjective experience to be predicted from brain states. But are your “inferred” and “would” meant to imply that they don’t?