Dear Bruno and Friends,
I was re-reading the Mauldin paper again and something struck me that I had
not noticed before. I hope that I am not way over my head on this one, but I
think that there is something of a straw man in Mauldin’s definition of the
supervenience thesis! He assumes the principle of Locality .
We read on page 409 of “Computation and Consciousness”:
“If an active physical system supports a phenomenal state, how could the
presence or absence of a causally disconnected object effect that state? How
could the object enhance or impede or alter or destroy the phenomenal state
except via some causal interaction with the system? Since the phenomenal state
is entirely realized at the time of the experience, only the activity of the
system at that time should be relevant to its production. The presence or
absence of causally isolated objects could not be relevant. This is all the
supervenience thesis needs to say.”
Now, let us take a look at Bell’s theorem. From the wiki article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
“Bell's theorem has important implications for physics and the philosophy of
science as it indicates that every quantum theory must violate either locality
or counterfactual definiteness. In conjunction with the experiments verifying
the quantum mechanical predictions of Bell-type systems, Bell's theorem
demonstrates that certain quantum effects travel faster than light and
therefore restricts the class of tenable hidden variable theories to the
nonlocal variety.”
end quote
While we are considering the idea of “causal efficacy” here and not hidden
variable theories, the fact that it has been experimentally verified that
Nature violates the principle Locality. Therefore the assumption of local
efficacy that Mauldin is using for the supervenience thesis is not realistic
and thus presents a flaw in his argument. We cannot claim that only those
objects in some near distance or time of flight to the system that we propose
is a generator of phenomenal states are the only ones that are involved in the
emergence of the phenomenal states.
We have overwhelming experimental evidence that the classical assumptions
must be carefully examined to be sure that they are correct. The locality
assumption is flawed. So what if instead we question the contrafactual
definiteness aspect? If we disallow for the definiteness of contrafactuals then
Mauldin cannot construct Olympia and thus his argument does not work either.
Onward!
Stephen
PS, It is interesting that you mention reincarnation, Bruno. I too am friendly
toward that idea and I am a little bit motivated in my questions about
interactions with you by something that my wife mentioned to me in a
conversation that we had about the idea of reincarnation of souls. She asked
me” “Could bodies be necessary so that souls can interact with each other and
thus evolve?” By the way, the Syfy television channel’s series “Caprica”
explored a very cool computational version of reincarnation that you might find
amusing.
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