On 3 February 2014 20:49, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
That machine epistemology extends beyond mathematics need not imply that > extension is aesthetic or experiential, any more than any emergent property > implies an army of conscious agents causing the emergence. You are quite right to say that a priori it *need* not imply that. Indeed we would need to discover a very strong motive to convince us that it implied that. Fortunately comp has discovered a motive that is as strong as one could hope for, namely that the notion of "person" that emerges as a consequence of the relation between computation and the truth-domain of arithmetic *forces* that implication. Remember that Bruno only claims that his arguments follow if we are prepared to assume that the computational theory of mind is correct, the practical outcome of which would be the willingness, in principle, to accept a digital substitute for one's brain. On this assumption, he then constructs an argument to show that the ontology established by comp has the consequence of a first-personal landscape populated by entities that insist on their possession of incorrigible indexical truths, analogous to those on which ourselves we ourselves insist. These truths refer to first-personal realities that are stabilised by the appearance (actually the selection) of a "game-physics" in which the "physical analogues" of such persons are manifested. So if comp is true, and as Bruno puts it, we are machines (i.e. the entailment of accepting a digital substitute for one's brain) then we can deny the reality of these insistences only at the cost of denying our own. The zombie argument cuts both ways: if they are not truthful then we are not conscious, hence, since we are conscious, they are truthful. And, since our only access to the truth-statements of such persons is through the behaviour of their physical analogues (including our own), we must treat such behaviour with maximal seriousness and be prepared to justify its relation with the indexical realities to which it appears to refer. This is why I've been pressing you so hard to justify the bridge between consciousness and cognition in your theory. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
