On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 11:45:52AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > To Russell: I don't understand what you mean by a "conscious > description". Even the expression "conscious" machine can be misleading > at some point in the reasoning.
A description could be conscious in the same way that with computationalism, a program might be conscious. With computationalism, a certain program is considered conscious when run on an appropriate UTM. However, as you showed in chapter 4 of your thesis it is not necessary to actually run the program on a physical machine. Church-Turing thesis and arithmetical platonism (my all description strings condition fulfills a similar role to arithmetical platonism) are enough. Furthermore, if the conscious program _is_ a UTM in its own right, it can run on itself (actually this is pretty much what my reading of what the Church-Turing thesis is). This obviates having to fix the UTM. Perhaps this is the route into the anthropic principle. This is a model of a conscious description, under the assumption of computationalism. Perhaps this model can be extended to not-computationalism, where a description is conscious if it is able to interpret itself as conscious. I do not have problem with observers being capable of universal computation as a necessary precondition here, should it be necessary. Finally, there is the possibility that a concrete observer (the noumenon) exists somewhere, and that "conscious descriptions" are merely the anthropic "shadow" of the observer being observed by itself. > It is really some person, which can be > (with comp) associate relatively to a machine/machine-history, who can > be conscious. > Imo, only a person can be conscious. Isn't this the definition of "person"? Or do you define personhood by something else. > Even the notion of OM, as it is > used in most of the recent posts, seems to me be a construction of the > mind of some person. It is personhood which makes possible to attribute > some sense to our many living 1-person OMs. > > Bruno > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics 0425 253119 (") UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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