On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 1:51 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 12/14/2011 10:40 AM, Joseph Knight wrote: > > > > On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:32 PM, Kim Jones <kimjo...@ozemail.com.au>wrote: > >> Any chance someone might précis for me/us dummies out here in maybe 3 >> sentences what Tim Maudlin's argument is? Nothing too heavy - just a quick >> refresher. >> >> I'll try, but with a few more than 3 sentences. Suppose the > consciousness of a machine can be said to supervene on the running of some > program X. We can have a machine run the program but only running a > constant program Y that gives the same output as X for one given input. In > other words, it cannot "handle" counterfactual inputs because it is just a > constant program that does the same thing no matter what. Surely such a > machine is not conscious. It would be like, if I decided "I will answer A B > D B D D C A C..." in response to the Chemistry test I am about to run off > and take, and happened to get them all correct, I wouldn't really know > Chemistry, right? > > > But I think Russell has reasonably questioned this. You say X wouldn't > know chemistry. But that's a matter of intelligence, not necessarily > consciousness. We already know that computers can be intelligent, and > there's nothing mysterious about intelligence "supervening" on machines. > Intelligence includes returning appropriate outputs for many different > inputs. But does consciousness? > I was really just using my Chemistry test as an imperfect analogy to the machine running Y being conscious (or not), so it doesn't affect the rest of the argument. But I see your point. Would you argue that a constant program (giving the same output no matter the input) can be conscious in principle? Maudlin assumes that such a program cannot be conscious, in his words, "it would make a mockery of the computational theory of mind." I am agnostic. In my opinion the Filmed Graph argument is more convincing than Maudlin, because with Maudlin one can still fall back to the position "consciousness can in principle supervene on a constant program". (For those interested, here is the article itself<http://www.finney.org/~hal/maudlin.pdf> ) > > Brent > > > > So consciousness doesn't supervene on Y. But Maudlin (basically) shows > that you can just add some additional parts to the machine that handle the > counterfactuals as needed. These extra parts don't actually do anything, > but their "presence" means the machine now could exactly emulate program X, > i.e., is conscious. So a computationalist is forced to assert that the > machine's consciousness supervenes on the presence of these extra parts, > which in fact perform no computations at all. > > I think what Russell said about this earlier, i.e., in a multiverse the > extra parts are doing things, so consciousness then appears at the scale of > the multiverse -- is fascinating. But I am out of time. Hope this helped. I > would recommend reading the original paper for the details. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
