Le 07-août-05, à 22:20, Hal Finney a écrit :
Rutgers philosopher Tim Maudlin has a paper intended to challenge certain
views about consciousness and computation, which we have discussed
occasionally on this list.
Indeed. Maudlin's paper is without doubt one of the most important paper in the philosophy of mind literature. Note that Barnes' answer, in the same journal, is worth reading too.
It is called "Computation and Consciousness",
Journal of Philosophy v86, pp. 407-432. I have temporarily put a copy
online at http://www.finney.org/~hal/maudlin.pdf .
Many thanks for this. I urge people to download it at once! Then we will have all the time to discuss it. It is equivalent (logically) with my "movie-graph" argument. An analysis of Maudlin's in term of movie graph is done (in french) in my Brussel's "thesis" and a shorter one in my french Lille thesis.
Maudlin is responsible for relating this issue with the counterfactual issue, which can be related quasi-directly to quantum logic, thanks to a very cute and readable paper by Hardegree:
Hardegree, G. M. (1976). The Conditional in Quantum Logic. In Suppes, P., editor, Logic and Probability in Quantum Mechanics, volume 78 of Synthese Library, pages 55-72. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland.
I even tend to think that a refinement of Maudlin's paper (using Hardegree) could lead to an elimination of the need of the Universal Dovetailer Argument (but that is still a little bit speculative) to derive the quantum from comp. Actually Russell did provide an hint in that direction in his answer to Hal's post.
This is a personal
copy and I would ask you not to redistribute it.
I will try to get some authorization. It will be hard for me not putting that paper in my webpage. Did you just scanned it. I would acknowledge the fact. You can give me suggestion for preventing your sending into jail ;-)
I will comment your post asap. Meanwhile, just note that what Maudlin calls "supervenience", I prefer to call it "physical supervenience", so that I keep a notion of comp-supervenience.
In a nutshell, Maudlin, like me, proves the incompatibility of digital mechanism and materialism. Maudlin presupposes materialism, so he concludes there is a problem with comp. I presuppose mechanism and conclude there is a problem with materialism.
Have a nice week-end, Hal and all,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
