On 27 March 2014 23:42, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> 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? 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 [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.
