On 08 Oct 2011, at 04:11, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
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.
Why?
Given the number of Aristotelians, it is wise to let them interpret it
in that way.
But I don't do it. I am neutral, agnostic. No need to assume a
primitively real physical universe at the start. I assume "yes doctor"
and Church thesis.
saying "yes doctor" does not imply that we believe in a primitively
material doctor, nor a primitively material brains. We need only
stable patterns, up to the level we bet on.
We need a sufficiently deterministic neighborhood we can trust, but it
does not matter where that trust come from (a physical world, a wavy
multiverse or the numbers, ...)
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.
Yes. But I bring up the physical supervenience, including the
assumption of a primary physical universe, only explicitly in step 7
( with some role), and eliminate it (assuming it again, but for the
reductio ad absurdum) in step 8.
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.
Hmm..., comp admits exactly the same definition throughout all UDA. In
some presentation I make it explicit that science has not find any
evidence for a primitive material reality. The founders of QM did
doubt this for physical reason, too. Physicists never use such
hypothesis, except as a tool in everyday life, like each of us. It is
an obvious extrapolation from how the animals conceive their
neighborhoods. I thought naively that, all scientists knew since
Plato, that physicalism and the existence of *primary* physical
universe is an hypothesis, and that it is just hard to decide on this
before some reasonable progress are made on the mind-body problem.
I was naive; It took me time to understand that for some scientists,
such physical primitive existence was a non questionable taboo. In it
from bit, Wheeler did put some doubt, though. Tegmark and Schmidhuber
were close, but dismiss the first persons, which comp illustrates some
key role.
But you are right, most people will look in that sequence. Most
aristotelians confuse mechanism and materialism. And mechanism is
often used to eliminate the notion of soul from the materialis view.
But digital mechanism and weak materialism don't fit well. It defies
Occam. And digital mechanism show machines have quite reasonable
notion of souls.
Bruno
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Stathis Papaioannou
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