On 10/2/07, Jesse Mazer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Vladimir Nesov wrote: > > > >Are you asking why I consider notion of p-zombieness meaningful? > > By "p-zombieness" are you referring to philosophical zombies? If so, I > suppose I find them "meaningful" as a philosophical thought-experiment for > making the case that facts about consciousness are at least partly > independent from facts about the physical world, but I don't believe that > any real-world implementation of a mind would be a philosophical zombie > (see > Chalmers' argument about 'fading qualia' at > http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html ) -- do you?
I found this paper particularly mind-bogging. It turns about the argument that since mind is implemented by brain, mind can't have a property that is not present in given implementation. Which ignores the possibility that there can be multiple minds that correspond to given implementation, and there are implementations in other worlds that can receive the mind without breaking subjective experience, even when from third-person POV you can argue that there are strange things going on with mind that could correspond to given contraption (which should instead be attributed to changes in set of minds that corresponds to contraption in question). Basically, I now define a mind by set of worlds in which it can find itself subjectively. This set roughly corresponds to set of worlds that only differ in things it doesn't know about, as if you jump from one world to another, you won't notice it if only things you don't know about were changed. With simplifying assumption that mind is implemented by a limited material structure in each of these equivalent worlds, it's possible to say that all worlds that contain the same implementation are equivalent, independent on all the rest of their content. So, notion of complete worlds is useless, as observations are selected arbitrarily in a way that is consistent with observer. Worlds are constructed 'on the fly' from their fragments. Any relation between parts of the world is a property of observer, because if it didn't know about this relation, it would be undefined (arbitrary). Observation (time) is a process of interaction between world fragments which creates new fragments. Brain-like structure has a very interesting property of being strongly connected. Each element of the brain depends on other elements of it, so sets of the worlds in which some of these fragments are present are very similar. Functional elements of the same mind inhabit the same set of worlds. More than that, brain learns tremendous amount of facts about its environment, thus selecting a narrow and structured set of worlds consistent with it. When brain is destroyed, elements become independent and mind expands to bigger set of worlds, which corresponds to loss of structure it can consistently observe. -- Vladimir Nesov mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
