On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 1:35 PM, soulcatcher☠ <soulcatche...@gmail.com>wrote:
> > Are you physicalist? > > I just don't know. > All my everyday experience points towards physicalism: I'm a brain, > embodied in a physical body, embedded in a physical environment and > evolved via several billion year selection process. All the > constituents of my mind could be explained in the evolutionary terms > as "devices" that promoted the survival of my ancestor's genes. > From the other hand, all the scientific knowledge imo points towards > some kind of "digital physics". For example, it's much much easier to > just accept modern high-energy physics as a elaborate pure > mathematical theory than try to understand it in the everyday terms of > "material world". > > > Have you read Everett? There are already physicists who describe > "reality" > > as a flux of information which differentiate in many histories, sometimes > > recombining by amnesia, etc. > > You may read the book by Russell Standish theory of Nothing. > > The book Mind's I, ed. by Hofstadter and Dennett is a good introduction > to > > computationalism. > > Stathis mentioned Parfit's "reasons and persons" recently on the FOR > list, > > where we discuss on similar "many-reality" conception of reality. I would > > recommend it too. In particular you may read David Deutsch's book "the > > fabric of Reality". > > Gunther Greindl has put some more advanced references on the web page of > the > > list. > > Are you aware of computer science and mathematical logic? > > You could be interested by my own contribution, which I explain on this > > list, see > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html > > I didn't read Everett and Deutsch but I'm aware of MWI. > I skimmed over Theory of Nothing some time ago and, to be honest, I > didn't like to, partially due to Quantum Immortality thing - it was my > first encounter with the subject and it seemed like a worst kind of > unscientific wishful thinking. But maybe I should give it another, > this time more serious try. > > I'll make an attempt to follow your UDA steps and can accept comp as a > _hypothesis_, but now I'm highly skeptical about computationalism as a > valid theory of consciousness. > Every time I think about it I come to the "simulated thunderstorm is > NOT a real thunderstorm" argument (I don't know the other name, for > the first time I read about in some interview with Searle). It's easy > for me to accept the possibility of conscious robot (I'm such a robot) > but it's hard to accept the possibility of conscious "pure" (as in CS > i.e. without side effects) computer program, as computationalism > implies (if I understand it right). > > > If you can accept the possibility of a conscious robot, whose senses are hooked up to video cameras, microphones, etc. would you say the robot would still be conscious if one were too hook up the video and audio inputs of the robot to the output of a virtual environment (think video game)? Now what if both the robot's software and environment rendering software ran within the same computer? Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
