โ Scribed by Raziel Abelson
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Clatterbaugh and Nathanson, in maintaining that "contingent factors might be capable of limiting the number of possible thoughts" (Clatterbaugh) and that "minds ... must have a limited duration and limited intelligence" (Nathanson), simply miss the point of my distinction between thinking of any number and thinking of a// numbers. Of course, no one can think of all numbers. But my point, which I see I must restate briefly, was that if the 2 k discrete brain states were correlated with the elements of a set of thoughts of numbers, then one could think of a number not in that set, and there would be no brain state left to correlate with that thought. This point, so far as I can see ,has nothing whatever to do with the "number of possible thoughts" (not to be confused with the number of thoughts any one of which can be thought) nor with the "duration and intelligence of minds". My argument depends, that is, not on the possible number of thoughts one can think, but on the number of thoughts each of which it is possible to think.
Wadia correctly criticizes me for expressing myself ambiguously at a key point, but he is wrong in claiming that my "argument turns on" that mistake. In the passage he cites from my paper, it was careless of me to speak of "thoughts of numbers greater than 2 ~''. I should instead have used the phrase "thoughts of numbers not correlated with any of the 2 k brain states". For if the 2 k brain states were, on my hypothesis, correlated with thoughts of numbers, the latter need not have been just the numbers from 1 to 2 k. Some of them could well be greater than 2 k. But my point would still hold that we could then think of a number not in the set with which the brain states had been correlated.
Wadia's main contention is that the brain can "generate any type of brain state from (among) an infinite number of possible brain state types", and thus is no more limited than our minds. I am not clear as to what he means by this notion of a brain generating types of states of itself. The
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