> Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:23:51 -0700
> Subject: Re: Emulation and Stuff
> From: david.ny...@gmail.com
> To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
>
>
> On 20 Aug, 10:09, Flammarion <peterdjo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > > OK. It's invalid because you can't have computaiton with zero phyiscal
> > > > activity.
> >
> > > But that is **precisely** the conclusion of the reductio that MGA
> > > proposes. MGA claims precisely that - as you say - since it is
> > > implausible to justify the ascription of computation to zero physical
> > > activity, if you still want to claim that there is computation 'going
> > > on', then it can't be attached to physical activity. Are you
> > > questioning that MGA constitutes a valid instantiation of a physical
> > > TM? What about Olympia?
> >
> > I should have added that you can;t have computaton with zero
> > computational activity.
>
> One more time then, using Olympia as the reductio ad absurdum: this
> relies on radical minimisation of physical activity to render
> implausible the notion of the attachment of instantiation-invariant
> consciousness-as-computation to PM.
I don't think the Olympia argument is really the final nail in the coffin for
the notion that computations can only be instantiated by the right sorts of
physical processes; there might be other ways of defining when a physical
process counts as an "instantiation" of a given abstract computation that don't
lead to the same problems. See my speculations about a physical process needing
to have the same "causal structure" as the abstract computation, with causal
structure defined *not* in terms of counterfactuals but rather in terms of
which facts imply which other facts, in the posts at
http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@googlegroups.com/msg16244.html and
http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@googlegroups.com/msg16257.html
...this notion of causal structure isn't totally developed and probably has
holes in it, but I don't see any reason to rule out the idea that it couldn't
be developed into a coherent notion of "instantiation" that wouldn't lead to
weird reductio ad absurdums like Olympia does for computations defined in terms
of counterfactuals.
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