The decline of Man's desire to achieve?

can someone explain that fella's PDF to me in 500 words or less

  On 1/23/2012 at 8:24 PM, we_kill_soapscum said:

can someone explain that fella's PDF to me in 500 words or less

Probably not! The most critical part of it is the first part, the Universal Dovetailer Argument (and of course the definitions at the beginning). It's explained pretty well and concisely in the pdf, so I am not sure how I could improve on it. It consists of 7 or 8 "steps" which are mostly quite easy to understand. Marchal is not a native English speaker so his writings can be somewhat hard to parse at times. I can help if there's some particular area of confusion. The conclusion is that if the computational theory of mind is true, then there is a reversal in primacy between physics and psychology; physicalism/materialism is false; the laws of physics we experience are the result of statistics over the execution of all programs (universal dovetailer). more or less.

Also it is a proof, not a theory. It is conceivable that the proof be invalid but I don't see where.