On 30 Jun 2012, at 23:52, Craig Weinberg wrote:
It seems to me that with functionalism a human identity cannot
necessarily be different from a any sufficiently complex functional
interaction. Something like a war, for instance involves lots of
dynamic i/o, 'processing', etc.
My question then is: Can you teleport the American Civil War to the
Moon?
Yes. In principle. Assuming comp. Just find the right state of all
americans at the beginning of the war, and a pretty precise
description of America, and implement all this on a very powerful
computer on the moon.
There is provably (assuming comp) infinitely many implementation of
the American civil war in arithmetic. And that is very easy to prove.
Again the hard part is to get the relative measure right.
Of course in arithmetic, UDA shows that the measure exists, or has to
exist, because if it does not exist, then comp has to be wrong. I
don't pretend that this is obvious.
Can you move Gettysburg to Moscow?
If comp is correct, you can emulate Gettysburg where you want.
Do you see what I am getting at? Human identity is not made of only
matter.
Well, if human identity is "made of matter" (what would that mean?),
then comp is wrong (whatever "ùade of matter" means).
It is made partly of unique interactions of unique events. Even
without first person fragmentation (which brain conjoined twins
suggest is not a problem - "I" can be spread out beyond an
individual body), there is nothing to suggest that the event
specific entanglement-momentum of any system can be reproduced
independently of context. If you duplicate Bruno's body, you get a
newborn baby in an adult body.
This will depend on the level of duplication.
If you duplicate Gettysburg you get a bunch of confused amnesiac
babies in uniforms. Each neuron has to discover its own connections
for the first time, recapitulating the experience of the individuals
or historic events as a whole as they struggle to cohere like a mass
of fibrillating cardiac cells unable to synch.
In your materialist non-comp theory, that is conceivable. But is such
primitive matter conceivable? I have no clue what that could mean. But
I know it means nothing if comp is assumed to be correct.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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