On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 3:02 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Nevertheless, you talk about swapping your brain for a suitably >> designed computer and consciousness surviving teleportation and >> pauses/restarts of the computer. > > Yes. > > > >> As a starting point, these ideas >> assume the physical supervenience thesis. > > It does not. At the start it is neutral on this. A computationalist > practitioner (knowing UDA, for example) can associate his consciousness with > all the computations going through its state, and believe that he will > survive locally on the normal computations (the usual "physical reality") > only because all the pieces of matter used by the doctors share his normal > histories, and emulate the right computation on the right level. But the > consciousness is not attributed to some physical happening hereby, it is > attributed to the infinitely many arithmetical relations defining his > possible and most probable histories. > Only in step 8 is the physical supervenience assumed, but only to get the > reductio ad absurdum. > > There is no [consciousness] evolving in [time and space]. There is only > [consciousness of time and space], "evolving" (from the internal indexical > perspective), but relying and associated on infinities of arithmetical > relations (in the 3-view). The progression surely must be to start by assuming that your mind is generated as a result of brain activity, rather than an immaterial soul. You then consider whether you would accept a computerised brain and retain consciousness. If you decide yes, you accept computationalism, and if you accept computationalism you can show that physical supervenience is problematic. You then adjust your theory to keep computationalism and drop physical supervenience or drop computationalism altogether. This is the sequence in which most people would think about 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.
