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reversibility, meaning, Dennett, Carol

Both Carol and Dennett are determinists and reductive physicalists.

Dennett (or rather, at least Dennett) believes that meaning matters.  That is, the "aboutness" of our thoughts and perceptions is important and able to influence the world.

He supports this belief with the parable of two black boxes.  One sends a signal via a wire to another black box.  One had two buttons (A and B) and the other had three lights: red, yellow and green.  Whenever you push the A button, the red light will flash.  Whenever you press the B button the green light flashes.  The signal to the wire is different each time.  Opening the black boxes and studying their operation, they found no similarity between the two.  Later they discover that the first box sends a message to the other in English: a message that is true (taken from its data base) if button A was pressed or false if B was pressed.  The second box then translates the English into Swedish Lisp and compares it with its Swedish language database.

This is supposed to show that meaning matters.

But what about reversibility?  This is a doctrine that, as Sean Carol emphasizes, is entailed by determinism (he is right if that determinism is based upon reductive materialism).  Dennet ignores reversibility.  But he ignores what undermines his own two black box argument.  For if you reversed the physical process, the information in the two computers would seem to be meaningless, but it would still achieve (following Carol) the correlation that Dennet thinks proves his point.  In other words, it seems that Carol's claim about reversibility undermines Dennet's example that he uses to argue that meaning matters in a reductive universe.

This looks promising, but I gotta polish it up more.

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