On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 04:48:37PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 06 Mar 2014, at 09:51, [email protected] wrote: > > > > > >What about others - like Russell (who might just read this and be > >willing to answer ). Does Russell > >(a) agree with you completely > > Only Russell can answer this. I would use "understand" instead of > "agree", because I don't think it i a question of agreeing. It is
I didn't respond earlier, because I wasn't actually all that clear what was being asked. > question of acknowledging the validity of a reasoning, or of showing > something missing or some flaws, or some unclarity. > from our conversation, I would say that Russell "agrees" with the > FPI, and probably UDA1-7, but as some reservation on the step 8. That is a fair summary. UDA 1-7 looks straightforward to me, and in any case, the conclusion to me accords with my world view (that physics emerges from some underlying theory, such as arithmetic), so that I have no problems accepting COMP as a potential working theory of consciousness. I do have reservations about step 8, which partly come from not being clear what the step actually addresses (ie what the problem is). In part, that is because I don't actually see a problem, so in some senses step 8 is redundant, but I have attempted to figure out what the step is trying to address, and have achieved some understanding of it. I intend to try to write that up as a paper that could help others, or at least act as a discussion point, as often the subtleties get lost in the mail archives. > > > >(b) think computation is intrinsically conscious > > But this wording is worst, as it looks like it insists that a > computation (or some computation) are conscious. But only a first > person is conscious, and a first person is nothing capable of being > defined in any 3p way. > > For example, a brain cannot think. Brain activity cannot think, a > computer cannot think, a computation cannot think, I would say. > This issue causes people a lot of problems. It does not matter for the purposes of UDA 1-7, but for step 8 is important. The issue is probably best handled using the concept of (COMP) supervenience - consciousness supervenes on the running of a program on a given reference machine. That machine and the running of the program can be quite abstract, of course, which is something people find hard to get, but is perfectly fine for the concept of supervenience. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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/d/optout.
