On 9 March 2010 09:06, Jack Mallah <[email protected]> wrote: >> If consciousness supervenes on the physical realization of a computation, >> including the inactive part, it means you attach consciousness on an unknown >> physical phenomenon. It is a magical move which blurs the difficulty. > > There is no new physics or magic involved in taking laws and counterfactuals > into account, obviously. So you seem to be just talking nonsense. > > The only charitable interpretation of what you are saying that I can think of > is that, like Jesse Mazer, you don't think that details of situations that > don't occur could have any effect on consciousness. Did you follow the > 'Factual Implications Conjecture' (FIC)? I do find it basically plausible, > and it's no problem for physicalism. > > For example, suppose we have a pair of black boxes, A and B. The external > functioning of each box is simple: it takes a single bit as input, and as > output it gives a single bit which has the same value as the input bit. So > they are trivial gates. We can insert them into our computer with no > problem. Suppose that in the actual run, A comes into play, while B does not. > > The thing about these boxes is, while their input-output relations are > simple, inside are very complex Rube Goldberg devices. If you study > schematics of these devices, it would be very hard to predict their > functioning without actually doing the experiments. > > Now, if box A were to function differently, the physical activity in our > computer would have been different. But there is a chain of causality that > makes it work. If you reject the idea that such a system could play a role > in consciousness, I would characterize that as a variant of the well-known > Chinese Room argument. I don't agree that it's a problem. > > It's harder to believe that the way in which box B functions could matter. > Since it didn't come into play, perhaps no one knows what it would have > done. That's why I agree that the FIC is plausible. However, in principle, > there would be no 'magic' involved even if the functioning of B did matter. > It's a part of the overall system, and the overall system implements the > computation.
But the consciousness of the system would be the same *whatever* the mechanism inside box A, wouldn't it? Suppose box A contains a probabilistic mechanism that displays the right I/O behaviour 99% of the time. Would the consciousness of the system be perfectly normal until the box misbehaved, or would the consciousness of the system be (somehow) 1% diminished even while the box was functioning appropriately? The latter idea seems to me to invoke magic, as if the system "knows" there is a dodgy box in there even if there is no evidence of it. -- 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.
