On 27 March 2014 23:42, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27 March 2014 19:11, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > >> On 26 Mar 2014, at 22:30, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >> >> On Thursday, March 27, 2014, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> >> 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? Even if it is and there are > an infinity of brains, why should that result in an infinity of minds? It > would seem unlikely that brains would evolve so that an arbitrarily small > change in the position of an electron would cause a change in > consciousness, and we know that even gross changes in the brain, as occur > in stroke or head injury, sometimes have remarkably little effect. > I think Bruno must have a materialist hat on here?! In comp the substitution level isn't necessarily at the level of individual electrons, surely... But that raises another question, for me at least - in comp are there only finitely many possible states of mind? So one would literally be able to travel full circle through all possible minds - eventually? -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
