On 13 Feb 2012, at 14:21, Stephen P. King 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" 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?
Yes, that's true. But it is not relevant for the MGA reductio ad
absurdum, which needs just to show that the physical activity of the
locally implemented computation is not relevant. If the amount of
physical activity can be made arbitrarily small, it cannot be related
to the physical *computation*, whose complexity remains unchanged for
some fixed amount of conscious experience. At that stage we just show
the falsity of the physical supervenience thesis. (Note also that some
version of MGA makes that primary physical activity null).
Bruno
I suspect that the folks in FOAR List that have been discussing
information and entropy might have a thought on this.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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