Re: Mind's place in nature

Does physicalism have predictive value? If we want to play chess with a computer, we have to act as though it is thinking and deciding, because it would take too long to analyze what it is doing in terms of the details of its programming. But given infinite time, we could use the latter approach and predict its every move. We have a complete understanding of how the computer's inputs generate its outputs. We have no such analogous understanding of how the human brain/body generates responses. We can postulate that such an understanding is theoretically possible, but we cannot even completely measure brain/body states, much less use them to predict behavior. We could as easily say that humans behave as God wills. Since we can't know (until it happens) what God wills, this hypothesis is not useful to us. What is the value of hypothesizing physicalism if it does not enable any useful predictions, and we must rely on other models to deal with actual human behavior? Is physicalism falsifiable? Perhaps this is just another aspect of questioning its predictive value, but could any observation or measurement disprove physicalism? The physicalist will simply answer that a more complete measurement of brain/body states and a fuller understanding of how they operate to produce behavior would account for any data that was claimed to contradict physicalism. But since we lack (and due to its complexity may well always lack) the ability to make those measurements and achieve that understanding, isn't physicalism an unfalsifiable hypothesis? hugzu ;-p