On 12 March 2010 11:59, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
>> The pathways are all intact and can spring into action if the person >> wakes up. There is a continuum from everything being there and ready >> to use immediately, to all there but parts of the system dormant, to >> not there at all but could be added if the person has extensive >> surgery. > > That would be a classical change and different from a MWI possibility. Does that matter here? I thought the argument was that if system A is capable of behaviour that system B is not capable, then A has different/greater consciousness than B even when we consider the case where A and B are performing the same activity. A and B could be identical except that given a particular tricky question Q, A has access to a plugin module A' that will allow it to work out the answer, while B does not. For all inputs other than Q, A and B behave identically. Now I agree that A is more *intelligent* than B, if intelligence is the ability to solve problems, since A can solve one more problem than B. Intelligence involves potential, like specifying a car's top speed, so the counterfactuals here are relevant. But to say that A and B differ in their consciousness even when they have inputs other than Q (and therefore go through the same internal state changes), on the grounds that A can discriminate between more possible inputs, seems incredible. It would mean that the consciousness of A when it was doing non-Q processing would be affected by what happens to A': if it was destroyed, if it was disconnected, if the special adapter needed to connect it was lost so that it couldn't be used. We could do the experiment: A would describe changes in its experiences as changes were made to A' or its connection to A'. >> It's not incompatible with any physical observation to say that >> consciousness is instantiated by just a recorded sequence. > > Is it incompatible with any physical observation to say that consciousness > is instantiated by a rock? The only consciousness we have observation of is > our own 1st person. It's not plausible that it's a recording, though in > some sense it may be logically possible. Our consciousness is instantiated by a machine that interacts with its environment and has a complex, but consistent, response to environmental stimuli. This allows one conscious entity to observe another conscious entity, and postulate that it is conscious. If consciousnesses were instantiated all around us by random processes (or even by nothing at all) they would not be of the sort that can be observed at the level of the substrate of their implementation, which is why they are not observed. So yes, it's all compatible with our physical observations. -- 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.
