On 9/15/2012 7:36 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 2:50 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
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 <stephe...@charter.net
<mailto:stephe...@charter.net>> 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,
Under what theory do you (or Peter) operate under to decide whether or not an
abstraction in platonia "exists"?
It's not arbitrary. None of them exist. That's what 'abstract' means.
Brent
It seems arbitrary and rather biased to confer this property only to those abstractions
that happen to be nearest to us.
Why should this additional property, namely "existence", make any difference regarding
which structures in platonia can have the property of conscious? It seems like this
would lead to abstract objects that are only "abstractly conscious" and concrete objects
which have the full-fledged "concrete consciousness". After all, we say that 2 is even,
not that it is "abstractly even". If some program in platonia is conscious, is it
abstractly conscious or just conscious?
I think our existence in this universe makes the conclusion clear. In other branch of
the wave function, or in other physical universes predicted by string theory, our
universe exists only as an abstraction, yet our relative abstraction (to some entities)
does not makes us into zombies. Why should there be no symmetry in this regard? How
can our abstractions be zombies, while their abstractions are conscious?
Jason
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