Hi Folks,
I have been mulling over my conversations with Bruno, Joseph and
ACW in the EVERYTHING list and have a question. In SANE04 we read the
following:
"For any given precise running computation associated to some inner
experience, you
can modify the device in such a way that the amount of
physical activity involved is
arbitrarily low, and even null for dreaming experience which has no
inputs and no outputs.
Now, having suppressed that physical activity present in the
running computation, the
machine will only be accidentally correct. It will be correct only for
that precise computation,
with unchanged environment. If it is changed a little bit, it will
make the machine running
computation no more relatively correct. But then, Maudlin
ingenuously showed that
counterfactual correctness can be recovered, by adding non active
devices which will be
triggered only if some (counterfactual) change would appear in
the environment. Now this
shows that any inner experience can be associated with an arbitrary low
(even null) physical
activity, and this in keeping counterfactual correctness. And
that is absurd with the
conjunction of both comp and materialism."
Setting aside the problem of concurrency for now, how is it that we
are jumping over the difference between infinitely slow or even
"adiabatic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_process>" physical
process and "null" physical process?
I may be not even wrong here, but in math isn't it true that there is a
big difference between a quantity being arbitrarily small and a quantity
being zero? I suspect that the folks in FOAR List that have been
discussing information and entropy might have a thought on this.
Onward!
Stephen
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