On 27 Jan 2011, at 22:12, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 1/27/2011 10:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Jan 2011, at 15:47, Stephen Paul King wrote:
<snip>
Mathematical structures do not “do” anything, they merely
exist, if at all! We can use verbs to describe relations between
nouns but that does not change the fact that nouns are nouns and
not verbs. The movie graph is a neat trick in that is abstracts
out the active process of organizing the information content of
the individual frames and the order of their placement in the
graph, but that some process had to be involved to perform the
computation of the content and ordering cannot be removed, it is
only pushed out of the field of view. This is why I argue that we
cannot ignore the computational complexity problem that exist in
any situation where we are considering a optimal configuration
that is somehow selected from some set or ensemble.
I don't see how this would change anything in the argument, unless
you presuppose consciousness is not locally Turing emulable, to
start with.
What does "locally" mean in this context? I doubt that
consciousness is strictly local in the physical sense; it requires
and world to interact with.
It means that, when saying yes to the doctor, you will not only
survive, but you will feel the same physical laws. You will not change
the relative measure on your computations. It might be necessary to
duplicate a part of the environment, which, in that case has to be
supposed to be Turing emulable in that same sense. That is why I
mention the notion of generalized brain. If the environment is not
Turing emulable, you have to use another theory of mind than the
mechanist one.
Consciousness per se, and first person, and matter (first person
plural) are not locally emulable. First person point of views are
related with the infinite continuum of computations going through
their states, and that is not algorithmic (assuming digital mechanism).
If my local body is a machine, my soul, I, is not a machine. I should
say.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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