On 9/15/2012 8:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 14 Sep 2012, at 18:36, Jason Resch wrote:
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 8:32 AM, Stephen P. King <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I contend that universality is the independence of computations to any
particular
machine but there must be at least one physical system that can implement a
given
computation for that computation to be knowable. This is just a
accessibility
question, in the Kripke sense of accessible worlds
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility_relation>.
Stephen,
Could you provide a definition of what you mean by 'physical system'?
Do you think it is possible, even in theory, for entities to distinguish whether they
are in a physical system or a mathematical one? If so, what difference would they test
to make that distinction?
I am "philosophically" pretty well convinced by this argument.
But there is still a logical problem, pointed by Peter Jones (1Z) on this list.
Peter believes that comp makes sense only for primitively material machine,
period.
So he would answer to you that the mathematical machine is just not conscious, and that
the distinction you ask is the difference between being conscious (and material) and
being non conscious at all (and immaterial).
I don't see any way to reply to this which does not bring the movie graph, the 323
principles, and that kind of stuff into account.
But of course I can understand that the idea that arithmetic is full of immaterial
philosophical zombies is rather weird, notably because they have also endless discussion
on zombie, and that arithmetic contains P. Jones counterpart defending in exactly his
way, that *he* is material, but Peter does not care as they are zombie and are not
conscious, in his theory.
In Peter's ontology, with which I have considerable empathy, they simply don't exist.
"Exist" is what distinguishes material things from Platonia's abstractions - of course
that doesn't play so well on something called the *EVERYTHING-LIST*. :-)
Brent
I would be happy if there was a simple way to avoid such quasi ad hoc zombies, without
going through MGA, which is quite subtle for some people, and perhaps weak as it is not
clear if comp really logically imply the 323 principle.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ <http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/>
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