2008/11/28 Kory Heath <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I still feel like I don't have a handle on how you feel the move to > Platonia solves these problems. If we imagine the mathematical > description of filling a 3D grid with the binary digits of PI, > somewhere within it we will find some patterns of bits that look as > though they're following the rules to Conway's Life. If we see > creatures in there, would they be conscious? What about the areas in > that grid where we find the equivalent of Empty-Headed Alice, where > most of the cells seem to be "following the rules" of Conway's Life, > but the section where a creature's "visual cortex" ought to be is just > filled with zeros? In other words, why doesn't the "partial zombie" > problem still exist for us in Platonia?
Asking questions like this about platonic objects isn't like asking the same questions about objects in a physical world. Abstract threeness is not a kind of picture of what we would recognise as threeness in the physical world: three objects, or five objects which could be seen as two lots of two and one lot of one object, or the Arabic numeral "3". Similarly, you can't point to a picture of a physical computer and ask whether that is giving rise to a particular computation in Platonia. Threeness, computations and consciousness exist eternally and necessarily, and can't be created, destroyed or localised. I realise this coming close to regarding consciousness as akin to the religious notion of a disembodied soul. But what are the alternatives? As I see it, if we don't discard computationalism the only alternative is to deny that consciousness exists at all, which seems to me incoherent. -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
