On 12/8/2011 6:35 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 12/8/2011 9:01 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/8/2011 5:48 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 12/8/2011 6:45 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/8/2011 3:04 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Dec 8, 4:44 pm, "Stephen P. King"<stephe...@charter.net> wrote:
On 12/8/2011 4:22 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
To suppose computation requires a material process would be
materialism, wouldn't it?
Hi Craig,
Not quite, a dualist model would require that some form of material
process occur for computations and would go even further in prohibiting
computations from not having a physical component but would not specify
which it was. This way we preserve computational universality without
having to drift off into idealism and its own set of problems.
True, it could be dualism (or an involuted monism) too, but I wouldn't
call a theory of mind which depends on material processes
computationalism.
You might if you thought that's all that was needed to make a mind, in contrast to
some supernatural soul stuff. It basically boils down to whether you suppose there
are some things that are real (e.g. some things happen and some don't, or some stuff
exists and some doesn't) and some aren't or you suppose that everything happens and
exists. In the latter case there's really no role for ur stuff whose only function
is to mark some stuff as existing and the rest not.
Brent
Hi Brent,
Interesting role that you have cast the physical world into, but ironically "stuff
whose only function is to mark some stuff as existing and the rest not" and
"everything happens and exists" do not sleep together very well at all. The
"everything happens and exists" hypothesis has a huge problem in that is has no way of
sorting the "Tom sees this and not that" from the " from "Dick sees this and not that"
and "Jane sees this and not that", where as the "stuff whose only function is to mark
some stuff as existing and the rest not" can be coherently defined as the union of
what Tom, Dick and Jane see and do not see.
The idealists would have us believe that along with numbers their operations there
exists some immaterial stratifying medium that sorts one level of Gedel numbering from
another. I am reminded of a video I watched some time ago where a girl had three
sealed jars. One contained nothing, one contained 4 6-die and the third contained
1,242,345,235,235 immaterial 6-die. ...
The physical world is very much real, even if it vanishes when we look at it
closely enough. But we might consider that just as it vanishes so too does the ability
to distinguish one set of numbers from another. If the ability to distinguish this
from that itself vanishes, how are we to claim that computations exist "independent of
physics"? Seriously!?!
Where did I claim that. I was just pointing out the genesis of "everything theories";
you did notice that this is called the "everything-list" didn't you?
Brent
HI Brent,
I commented on what you wrote. Care to respond or will you beg my question? How does
immaterial based "everything theories" deal with this problem that I just outlined?
You should ask a proponent of such theories; like Bruno. But as I understand it, the
ultimate application of Ocaam's razor is to refuse to make any distinctions, so that we
theorize that everything exists. But the unqualified everything doesn't seem to be
logically coherent. So Bruno backs off to an "everything" that is well defined and still
possibly comprehensive, i.e. everything that is computable. Within this plenuum there are
various states (numbers in arithmetic) and some principle will pick out what part we
experience. Computation includes an uncountable infinity of states and relations between
states - so whatever we experience must be in there somewhere.
I'm intrigued by David Deutsche's assertion that different physics implies that different
things are computable, but I'm doubtful that it's true.
Brent
Onward!
Stephen
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