On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 12:28:04PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> >
> >RS As I understand it, COMP refers to the conjunction of:
> >
> >1) Arithmetic realism
> >2) Church-Turing thesis
> >3) Survivability of consciousness under duplication
>
>
>
> BM...and annihilation of the "original" (if not it could be trivial). I guess
> that's what you intended to mean.
and I add, digital "duplication". (that's why Church thesis has to be called for)
How does COMP entail that I am a machine? I don't follow that step at all.
But comp *is* the assumption that I am a machine, even a digital machine.
My last formulation of it, easy to remember is that comp = YD + CT + RA
YD = Yes doctor, it means you accept a artificial digital brain.
(and CT is Church thesis, and RA is some amount of arithmetical realism).
In "conscience et mecanisme" comp is called MEC-DIG-IND, DIG is for
digital, and IND is for indexical. It really is the doctrine that I am a digital
machine, or that I can be emulated by a digital machine.
> Computationnalism is really the "modern" digital version of "Mechanism" > a philosophy guessed by early Hindouist, Plato, ... accepted for animals by > Descartes, for humans by La Mettrie, Hobbes, etc. With Church > thesis mechanism can leads to pretty mind/matter theories. >
If one accepts mechanisms that go beyond the Turing machine, then computationalism is a stricter assumption than mere mechanism (which I basically interpret as "anti-vitalism").
I would counter that a Geiger counter hooked up to a radioactive source is a "mechanism", yet the output cannot be computed by a Turing machine. (Of course some people, such as Schmidhuber would disagree with that too, but that's another story).
But no mechanism can compute the output of any self-duplication. With Everett formulation of QM, a Geiger counter is emulable by a turing machine, and the QM indeterminacy is just a first person comp indeterminacy. You cannot emulate with a turing machine the *first person* knowledge he/she gets from looking at the Geiger counts, but no machine can predict the first person knowledge of a Washington/Moscow self-duplication either.
Bruno
