On 27 Mar 2014, at 11:42, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 27 March 2014 19:11, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
On 26 Mar 2014, at 22:30, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Thursday, March 27, 2014, Russell Standish
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 05:06:46PM +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> The engineering tolerance of the brain must be finite (and far
higher than the Planck level) if we are to survive from moment to
moment, and that implies there are only a finite number of possible
brains and hence mental states.
>
Steady on, I don't think it does that at all, unless you constrain
the
physical world to be bounded somehow in both space and time.
I think you were just trying to say that the space of brains (and
mental states) is discrete, something I could agree with.
Unless you allow brains to grow infinitely big, there are only a
finite number of possible brains even in an infinite universe.
Assuming comp. If the brain is defined by its "material" quantum
state, and assuming electron position is a continuous observable,
then we can have an infinity of brains, even when limiting their size.
Is electron position a continuous observable?
It is in most presentation of classical and "special-relativistic" QM.
I would say it is also in String theory, but it would not in Loop
gravity like theory.
Even if it is and there are an infinity of brains, why should that
result in an infinity of minds?
Why not, for someone who associate consciousness and identity to its
current matter and its continuous transformation.
It would seem unlikely
With mechanism or functionalism. But I am not sure of the meaning of
"unlikely" when said by a non-mechanist. Some people will find
unlikely that you could ever survive with a digital brain if the local
priest does not bless it with some holy matter.
that brains would evolve so that an arbitrarily small change in the
position of an electron would cause a change in consciousness,
I agree, and that is a powerful argument in favor of comp. But to
invalidate a reasoning, *any* counterexample will do.
and we know that even gross changes in the brain, as occur in stroke
or head injury, sometimes have remarkably little effect.
Yes.
My point was only that when you say that there is only an enumerable
set of possible brain and mind state, you are using computationalism,
that is: digitalism. A non computationalist can consistently conceive
a continuum of brain and mind states. It looks non reasonable because
we bet on some digitalness acting already in nature. I could argue,
with Diderot, that our very conception of "explanation", and
"rationality" is essentially computationalist, making comp quasi 3p
obvious, and non-comp 3p magical. But from the first person point of
view, like Craig illustrates, we feel the other way, comp seems 1p-non
sensical, and non-comp seems quasi obvious: intuitively we don't feel
like being a robot or machine.
Now, for an explicit, still functionalist in your sense, non
computationalist, for example for some one who believes that we are
aleph_24 machines, that is machines having aleph_24 functional
componants, he can conceive that the "space of mind states" mind be
"much bigger" (like aleph_25 or 2^aleph_24).
I think comp is equivalent with saying that the mind states (their
type) are enumerable (bijection with N).
They are certainly not "recursively", or mechanically enumerable (like
the total computable functions), although a superset can be (like the
phi_i, or the UD).
Bruno
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Stathis Papaioannou
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