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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Blockhead is not a nomic or physical possibility, even if Blockhead is a logical possibility.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.The argument conflates computational complexity with physical impossibility: what is computationally intractable need not violate any law of nature.
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    • 2.Physical laws constrain energy, matter, and causation, but no known law of physics sets an upper bound on the number of distinct physical states a system may occupy.
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    • 3.Therefore, the combinatorial explosion argument establishes only that Blockhead is practically unrealizable, not that it is nomically impossible.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Block's original 1981 presentation explicitly concedes Blockhead's practical infeasibility while insisting this is irrelevant to the conceptual point about behaviorism and mentality.
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    • 2.The supporting argument's move from 'physically unrealizable' to 'not a nomic possibility' equivocates between resource constraints and genuine law-governed impossibility, a distinction Ned Block, Daniel Dennett, and others treat as philosophically decisive.
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    • 3.If nomic possibility requires only consistency with physical law rather than realizability within actual resource constraints, Blockhead remains nomically possible because no fundamental law forbids arbitrarily large finite lookup structures.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.A look-up tree for a human being requires a combinatorial explosion of entries.
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    • 2.The laws and boundary conditions governing the physical world rule out the combinatorial explosion required for a Blockhead look-up tree.
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