On 06 Dec 2009, at 20:35, soulcatcher☠ wrote: >> Are you physicalist? > > I just don't know.
OK. > All my everyday experience points towards physicalism: I'm a brain, > embodied in a physical body, embedded in a physical environment and > evolved via several billion year selection process. Below, I see that you are open to the idea that you could be a conscious robot. But then you can understand that you are not your brain/robot's computer. Indeed, each morning the conscious robot could change the entirety of its hardware. So you ¨have* a brain. You are not a brain. If you are a conscious Robot you are already an immaterial living number (living relatively to a probable computational histories). > All the > constituents of my mind could be explained in the evolutionary terms > as "devices" that promoted the survival of my ancestor's genes. An explanation which I find plausible, but which has nothing to do with physicalism. > From the other hand, all the scientific knowledge imo points towards > some kind of "digital physics". Here I disagree. Even for physicists it is a complex open problem. And then I have given a proof that if I am a machine, then physics cannot be entirely computational. I now that it is a bit amazing and counterintuitive, but then that is why I explain the UD argument. > For example, it's much much easier to > just accept modern high-energy physics as a elaborate pure > mathematical theory than try to understand it in the everyday terms of > "material world". It is an advantage of comp, it solves the question of the amazing reliability of math in physics. > >> Have you read Everett? There are already physicists who describe >> "reality" >> as a flux of information which differentiate in many histories, >> sometimes >> recombining by amnesia, etc. >> You may read the book by Russell Standish theory of Nothing. >> The book Mind's I, ed. by Hofstadter and Dennett is a good >> introduction to >> computationalism. >> Stathis mentioned Parfit's "reasons and persons" recently on the >> FOR list, >> where we discuss on similar "many-reality" conception of reality. I >> would >> recommend it too. In particular you may read David Deutsch's book >> "the >> fabric of Reality". >> Gunther Greindl has put some more advanced references on the web >> page of the >> list. >> Are you aware of computer science and mathematical logic? >> You could be interested by my own contribution, which I explain on >> this >> list, see >> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html > > I didn't read Everett and Deutsch but I'm aware of MWI. > I skimmed over Theory of Nothing some time ago and, to be honest, I > didn't like to, partially due to Quantum Immortality thing - it was my > first encounter with the subject and it seemed like a worst kind of > unscientific wishful thinking. I would call that "terrifying" thinking. There is no way out for consciousness. > But maybe I should give it another, > this time more serious try. > > I'll make an attempt to follow your UDA steps and can accept comp as a > _hypothesis_, but now I'm highly skeptical about computationalism as a > valid theory of consciousness. > Every time I think about it I come to the "simulated thunderstorm is > NOT a real thunderstorm" argument (I don't know the other name, for > the first time I read about in some interview with Searle). It's easy > for me to accept the possibility of conscious robot (I'm such a robot) > but it's hard to accept the possibility of conscious "pure" (as in CS > i.e. without side effects) computer program, as computationalism > implies (if I understand it right). I think that Jason did provide the correct answer. If you agree you are a conscious robot/Turing-machine (or just Robot, + Church thesis) then you know in advance that there is a level of description of [you + the thunderstorm] such that you cannot distinguish the "real" thunderstorm from its simulation. So, from the point of view of the emulated "you" the simulated thunderstorm will seems as real as a real one, for at least a time, and the rest of the reasoning depends only on that. Comp = "I am a conscious robot". The falsity of physicalism is an arithmetical consequence of comp. 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.
