On 20 Oct 2012, at 13:35, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Bruno Marchal
Comp cannot give subjective content,
This is equivalent to saying that comp is false.
By definition of comp, our consciousness remains intact when we get
the right computer, featuring the brain at a genuine description level.
Then the math confirms this, even in the ideal case of the
arithmetically sound machine, and this by using the most classical
definition of belief, knowledge, etc.
can only provide an
objective simulation on the BEHAVIOR of a person (or his physical
brain).
This behavioral information can be dealt with by the
philosophy of mind called "functionalism":
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism/
Here you defend a reductionist conception of what machines and numbers
are. It fails already at 3p level, by the incompleteness phenomena.
(functionalism is an older version of comp, with the substitution
level made implicit, and usually fixed at the neuronal level for the
brain, and in that sense comp is a weaker hypothesis than
functionalism, as it does not bound the comp subst. level.
"Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what
makes something a mental
state of a particular type does not depend on its internal
constitution, but rather on the way
it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a
part. This doctrine is rooted in
Aristotle's conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes's
conception of the mind as
a “calculating machine”, but it has become fully articulated (and
popularly endorsed) only in
the last third of the 20th century. Though the term ‘functionalism’
is used to designate a variety
of positions in a variety of other disciplines, including psychology,
sociology, economics, and architecture, this entry focuses
exclusively on
functionalism as a philosophical thesis about the nature of mental
states."
A criticism of functionalism and hence of comp is that if one only
considers his physical behavior (and possibily but not necessarily
his brain's behavior),
a person can behave in a certain way but have a different mental
content.
Good point, and this is a motivation for making explicit the existence
of the level of substitution explicit in the definition.
To survive *for a long time* I would personally ask a correct
simulation of the molecular levels of both the neurons and the glial
cells in the brain.
The UD Argument does NOT depend on the choice of the substitution
level, as long you get a finite digital description relatively to a
universal number/theory/machine.
Bruno
Roger Clough, [email protected]
10/20/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Bruno Marchal
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-10-19, 03:31:54
Subject: Re: I believe that comp's requirement is one of "as if"
ratherthan"is"
On 17 Oct 2012, at 15:28, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 10/17/2012 8:45 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 16 Oct 2012, at 15:00, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 10/16/2012 8:23 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Tuesday, October 16, 2012 4:02:44 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:
There is of course the idea that the universe is actually a
simulation but that is more controversial.
A tempting idea until we question what it is a simulation of?
We can close this by considering when is a simulation of a "real
thing" indistinguishable from the "real thing"!
What law states that computations exist ab initio, but the capacity
to experience and participate in a simulated world does not?
Good point! Why not both existing ab initio?
But they exists ab initio in the arithmetical truth. So with comp,
we can postulate only the numbers, or the computations (they are
ontologically equivalent), then consciousness is semantical fixed
point, existing for arithmetical reason, yet not describable in
direct arithmetical term (like truth, by Tarski, or knowledge by
Scott-Montague. The Theaetetical "Bp & p" is very appealing in that
setting, as it is not arithmetically definable, yet makes sense in
purely arithmetical term for each p in the language of the machine
(arithmetic, say).
So we don't have to postulate consciousness to explain why machine
will correctly believe in, and develop discourse about, some truth
that they can know, and that they can also know them to be non
justifiable, non sharable, and possibly invariant for digital self-
transformation, etc.
Bruno
Hi Bruno,
We seem to have a fundamental disagreement on what constitutes
"arithmetic truth". In my thinking, the truth value of a proposition
is not separable from the ability to evaluate the proposition
I agree for mundane truth, but not for the truth we can accept to
built a fundamental theory.
If you accept comp, you know that the ability to evaluate a
proposition will be explained in term of a functioning machine, and
this is build on elementary arithmetical truth. So, with comp, you
statement would make comp circular.
Bruno
(as Jaakko Hintikka considers) and thus is not some Platonic form
that has some ontological weight in an eternal "pre-established
harmony" way. I do not believe that our reality is merely some pre-
defined program since I am claiming that the "pre-definition" is an
NP-Hard problem that must be solved prior to its use.
The best fit for me is an infinity of 1p, each that is a bundle
of infinite computations, that eternally interact with each other
(via bisimulation) and not some frozen and pre-existing Being. My
philosophy is based on that of Heraclitus and not that of
Parmenides. Being is defined in my thinking as the automorphisms
within Becoming, thus what is stable and fixed is just those things
that relatively do not change within an eternally evolving Universe.
--
Onward!
Stephen
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