I think you should probably read Maudlin's paper<http://www.finney.org/~hal/maudlin.pdf>for specifics. I don't think thermodynamics will have much to do with the conclusions, whatever they may be (and I don't think it's obvious what *exactly *Maudlin showed).
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 7:21 AM, Stephen P. King <stephe...@charter.net>wrote: > 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 > > -- > 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. > -- Joseph Knight -- 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.
