On 1/27/2011 2:23 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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.
Saying yes to the doctor who proposes to replace my brain with a digital
computer still leaves my body and the rest of the world non-digital and
non-local.
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.
But this seems to me dubious. All known theories of physics assume a
continuum of space, time, and probability. Many people think these may
be approximations to a finer, discrete structure, but so far as I know
there have not been any successful theories showing how these discrete
structures could emulate the continuum. You may object that the part of
the environment needed in a simulation of my consciousness is quite
small and so can easily be emulated by a discrete computation. But that
is only the case when my brain+other is treated as not entangled with
the rest of the universe. If this entanglement (including the whole
universe) is emulated then as in Bohmian or Everett's quantum mechanics,
the world is deterministic and at some level of precision Turing
emulable. But if the emulation attempts to be local then it must
include inherent randomness - which I think is not Turing computable.
So I think there is a tension here that is obfuscated by thinking of the
doctor just replacing your brain or a part of your brain and helping
yourself to the rest of the world. Your brain is entangled with the
rest of the world and either you need to leave the rest of the world in
place so your Turing emulation can be entangled (non-local), or you need
to emulate the whole world.
I think the whole world probably is Turing emulable, but then that does
not get rid of materialism. Material just becomes one of the things
emulated along with consciousness.
Brent
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/ <http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/>
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