On 30 Dec 2011, at 16:18, David Nyman wrote:
On 30 December 2011 12:07, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
What is a consciousness apart from its content?
That's a good question. May be it is cosmic consciousness, or pure
consciousness of pure consciousness, or perhaps the innate
consciousness of
the pre-löbian universal machine. Of course we lack identification
criterium
for consciousness, and my point was more logical than assertative,
in the
frame of "MGA's alleged refutations". I hope this will be clarified
in my
answer to Russell on supervenience. I will be occupied those next
days, so I
might answer this next year.
This interesting comment resonates with today's early morning
ruminations (a pernicious habit I apparently share with Descartes!).
I've been wondering again about the distinction between your view of
computationalism and something like Zuse's or Schmidhuber's. If I
have understood these latter ideas, they postulate a particular
digital machine as somehow ontologically privileged, this UM then
providing a unique basis for all subsequent computational development.
In the process the primitive UM must emulate infinities of other UMs,
but as all this computation ultimately supervenes on the activity of
the primitive UM, ontologically speaking it is "solus ipse", and all
points of view must therefore be referenced to it.
Yes. It is still physicalism, but digital and computationalist. They
single out a particular universal (or not) history. It is open, I
think, if those universal story are "robust", that is, contained a
universal dovetailer. By MGA that does not matter, if there is program
for the physical reality, to get both the qualia and the quanta in the
self-referentially correct way, you still have to justify its
existence from the mind-body arithmetical problem (and thus the modal
logics of self-reference, the machine interview, ...).
Digital physicalists are still cheating by copying Nature. So they
miss the whole psychological and theological side of the (comp) truth.
This idea seems to possess some nice features (for example with
respect to an ultimate reference point for "who am I?" questions), but
one might object that it originates too late in the computational
"food chain". After all, computation is itself reducible to more
fundamental combinatorial relations, so by what principle is some
particular UM - itself a complex combinatorial entity - supposed to
bootstrap itself into primitive existence? Perhaps such an idea puts
the computational cart before the arithmetical horse.
Quantum computation might have violated Church thesis, after all. So
people can still speculate on "hidden variable", and selection
principle to avoid the very big many dreams matrix. It seems to me
that QM shows on the contrary how deep we are already embedded in, as
comp suggested too.
And is the
primitive UM itself supposed to supervene on (i.e. be uniquely
anchored to) a "primitively-physical" machine? If so, would this
supervenience claim be vulnerable to an MGA-type of refutation?
Once you fix a UM, you get them all. And the laws of physics should be
independent of the initial choice. You are right, digital physics get
a sort of conceptual problem if taken too naively. I think it is just
inconsistent. Digital physics implies comp, but comp entails that
physics cannot a priori be digital. In particular the appearance of
primitive matter is not really Turing emulable, because it is the
result of first person statistics on infinities of computation. The
distribution might be computable though.
But in any case your comment above about "the innate consciousness of
the pre-löbian universal machine" is intriguing. ISTM that in the end
epistemology and ontology must come to one thing: whatever we know is
ultimately a self-reflection of whatever we are. Whatever we are is
both unique and multitudinous, a "One" that through
self-differentiation and self-combination explodes into combinatorial
universality. And from that explosion the "many" are born and suffer.
That's why progress can only be harm reduction. I think.
Je vous souhaite une très heureuse nouvelle année.
Cheers,
Bruno
On 29 Dec 2011, at 19:13, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/29/2011 8:47 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 28 Dec 2011, at 22:21, Russell Standish wrote:
On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 12:10:29PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
But I still fail to see what you mean by swapping two
consciousness.
In this case we have that the consciousness of [Tommy and
Samantha]
supervenes (weakly) on the physical activity in the classroom (to
change them, we have to change something physical in the
classroom),
in the same manner than the consciousness of Bruno and Russell
supervenes on the (phsyical, here) execution of the UD. That is
what
is used in the argument.
Bruno
We have two conscious states (Tommy and Samantha)
It might be the same consciousness, with different content.
??? That would be two different conscious states. What is a
consciousness apart from its content?
That's a good question. May be it is cosmic consciousness, or pure
consciousness of pure consciousness, or perhaps the innate
consciousness of
the pre-löbian universal machine. Of course we lack identification
criterium
for consciousness, and my point was more logical than assertative,
in the
frame of "MGA's alleged refutations". I hope this will be clarified
in my
answer to Russell on supervenience. I will be occupied those next
days, so I
might answer this next year.
Happy new year, Brent.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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