Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 25 Nov 2008, at 20:16, Brent Meeker wrote: > >> Bruno Marchal wrote: > >>>> Brent: I don't see why the mechanist-materialists are >>>> logically disallowed from incorporating that kind of physical >>>> difference into their notion of consciousness. >>> >>> Bruno: In our setting, it means that the neuron/logic gates have >>> some form of >>> prescience. >> Brent: I'm not sure I agree with that. If consciousness is a >> process it may be >> instantiated in physical relations (causal?). But relations are in >> general not >> attributes of the relata. Distance is an abstract relation but it >> is always >> realized as the distance between two things. The things themselves >> don't have >> "distance". If some neurons encode my experience of "seeing a rose" >> might not >> the experience depend on the existence of roses, the evolution of >> sight, and the >> causal chain as well as the immediate state of the neurons? > > > With *digital* mechanism, it would just mean that we have not chosen > the right level of substitution. Once the level is well chosen, then > we can no more give role to the implementations details. They can no > more be relevant, or we introduce prescience in the elementary > components.
But is causality an implementation detail? There seems to be an implicit assumption that digitally represented states form a sequence just because there is a rule that defines that sequence, but in fact all digital (and other) sequences depend on causal chains. > > >>> >>>> Bostrom's views about fractional >>>> "quantities" of experience are a case in point. >>> If that was true, why would you say "yes" to the doctor without >>> knowing the thickness of the artificial axons? >>> How can you be sure your consciousness will not half diminish when >>> the >>> doctor proposes to you the new cheaper brain which use thinner >>> fibers, >>> or half the number of redundant security fibers (thanks to a progress >>> in security software)? >>> I would no more dare to say "yes" to the doctor if I could loose a >>> fraction of my consciousness and become a partial zombie. >> But who would say "yes" to the doctor if he said that he would take >> a movie of >> your brain states and project it? Or if he said he would just >> destroy you in >> this universe and you would continue your experiences in other >> branches of the >> multiverse or in platonia? Not many I think. > > > I agree with you. Not many will say yes to such a doctor! Even > rightly so (with MEC). I think MGA 3 should make this clear. > The point is just that if we assume both MEC *and* MAT, then the > movie is "also" conscious, but of course (well: by MGA 3) it is not > conscious "qua computatio", so that we get the (NON COMP or NON MAT) > conclusion. It's not so clear to me. One argument leads to CONSCIOUS and the other leads to NON-CONSCIOUS, but there is not direct contradiction - only a contradiction of intuitions. So it may be a fault of intuition in evaluating the thought experiments. Brent > > I keep COMP (as my working hypothesis, but of course I find it > plausible for many reasons), so I abandon MAT. With comp, > consciousness can still supervene on computations (in Platonia, or > more concretely in the universal deployment), but not on its physical > implementation. By UDA we have indeed the obligation now to explain > the physical, by the computational. It is the reversal I talked about. > Somehow, consciousness does not supervene on brain activity, but brain > activity supervene on consciousness. To be short, because > consciousness is now somehow related with the whole of arithmetical > truth, and things are no so simple. > > Bruno > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
