On 02 Mar 2010, at 20:33, Jack Mallah wrote:
I finally figured out what was happening to my emails: the spam
filter got overly agressive and it was sending some of the list
posts to the spam folder, but letting others into the inbox. The
post I'm replying to now was one that was hidden that way.
--- On Sun, 2/14/10, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
Jack Mallah wrote:
What is false is your statement that "The only way to escape the
conclusion would be to attribute consciousness to a movie of a
computation". So your argument is not valid.
OK. I was talking in a context which is missing. You can also
conclude in the prescience of the neurons for example. The point is
that if you assume the physical supervenience thesis, you have to
abandon comp and/or to introduce magical (non Turing emulable)
property in matter.
That is false. Bruno, you don't have to assume any 'prescience'; you
just have to assume that counterfactuals count. No one but you
considers that 'prescience' or any kind of problem.
This would lead to fading qualia in the case of progressive
substitution from the Boolean Graph to the movie graph.
gradually replace the components of the computer (which have the
standard counterfactual (if-then) functioning) with components
that only play out a pre-recorded script or which behave correctly
by luck.
You could then invoke the 'fading qualia' argument (qualia could
plausibly not vanish either suddenly or by gradually fading as the
replacement proceeds) to argue that this makes no difference to
the consciousness. My partial brain paper shows that the 'fading
qualia' argument is invalid.
I am not using the 'fading qualia' argument.
Then someone else on the list must have brought it up at some
point. In any case, it was the only interesting argument in favor
of your position, which was not trivially obviously invalid. My PB
paper shows that it is invalid though.
?
I think there was also a claim that counterfactual sensitivity
amounts to 'prescience' but that makes no sense and I'm pretty
sure that no one (even those who accept the rest of your
arguments) agrees with you on that.
It is a reasoning by a an absurdum reduction. If you agree (with
any computationalist) that we cannot attribute prescience to the
neurons, then the physical activity of the movie is the same as the
physical activity of the movie, so that physical supervenience +
comp entails that the consciousness supervenes on the movie (and
this is absurd, mainly because the movie does not compute anything).
I guess by 'physical supervenience' you mean supervenience on
physical activity only.
Not at all. In the comp theory, it means supervenience on the physical
realization of a computation. MGA shows physical supervenience entails
comp supervenience. No universal machine can know what is its most
probable computation, and they can know that below that level, the
appearance come from all.
That is not what computationalism assumes. Computationalism assumes
supervenience on both physical activity and physical laws (aka
counterfactuals).
? You evacuate the computation?
There is no secret about that. Consciousness does not arise from
the movie, because the movie has the wrong physical laws. There is
nothing about that that has anything to do with 'prescience'.
This is not computationalism.
Now, there is a school of thought that says that physical laws don't
exist per se, and are merely descriptions of what is already in the
physical activity. A computationalist physicalist obviously rejects
that view.
Counterfactual behaviors are properties of the overall system and
are mathematically defined.
But that is the point: the counterfactuals are in the math.
Not in the physical activity.
Bruno, try to read what I write instead of putting in your own
meanings to my words.
I try politely to make sense to what you say by interpreting favorably
your term.
A physical system has mathematically describable properties. Among
these are the physical activity and also the counterfactuals. There
is no distinction to make on that basis. That is what I was
saying. That has nothing whatsoever to do with Platonism.
machine ... its next personal state has to be recovered from the
statistics on the possible relative continuations.
No, nyet, non, and hell no. That is merely your view, which I
obviously reject and which has nothing to recommend it - especially
NOT computationalism, your erroneous claims to the contrary.
Show the error, then.
But I think you have not even read the step zero (of UDA) correctly.
To explain comp I assume consensual reality. Comp is really the thesis
that I survive with a digital PHYSICAL brain. But we don't assume that
PHYSICAL is primitive, and indeed the reasoning shows that Comp
entails that the mind body problem is transformed into a problem of
justifying the emergence of the ohysical apparition from a relative
measure on computation (eventually given in the arithmetical UDA by Bp
& Dt, with p sigma_1).
It helps to be agnostic on primitive matter before trying to
understand the reasoning.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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