On 5/12/2014 9:40 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 11 May 2014, at 21:13, meekerdb wrote:
On 5/11/2014 12:54 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Yes, the rest follows, but the negation of the rest follows too, unless, like Peter
Jones, you add a criterion of primitive physical existence to what is needed for
consciousness. But then the movie graph can show that they attribute a magical role to
that primitive matter. The idea, for them, is that there is a primitive matter, and
that "the primitive character" is not Turing emulable.
But if the entangled and holistic character of the world requires that the Turing
emulation extend to essentially all of it then "primitive matter" just means "exists in
the emulation".
Not really. "primitive matter" (the quantum, plausibly) emerges from the fact that below
the substitution level we are confronted with infinitely many machines. From inside it
is not "exists in the emulation", it is "exists in the relatively more numerous" way.
Turing *emulation* is only meaningful in the context of emulating one part relative to
another part that is not emulated, i.e. is "real".
If you say so. We can still listen to the machine, and compare with nature.
That's why I think the MGA doesn't prove what you think it does. It is still the case
that something playing the role of "primitive matter - per Peter Jones" is necessary in
every world, and that role is to pick out what exists from what doesn't.
That looks like a fairy tale to me. The only role of such conception of matter seems to
be the prevention of digging deeper ... and there is the risk of the elimination of the
person. In a sense you give a name to God, you say it that one u, it wins the
competition by definition, because we see it.
It looks like a muddle to say that everything exists in every world. In general we don't
"see" primitive matter - all the theories of elementary particles are mathematical models
which are only indirectly supported by what we see.
As a rationalist I am not satisfied by such an explanation, if you keep in mind that my
interests are on the mind-body problem.
The MGA shows that such magical matter has "magical properties" non Turing emulable, to
be able to do what they do, without necessitating the lowering of the level.
Lowering the level to where? The MGA depends on the idea of providing for all
counterfactual possibilities. I think this leads to requiring emulation an arbitrarily
large domain of the world emulated - essentially another complete world. But in a
complete world "emulation" is meaningless; emulation is only relative to "real".
But the point is that it is testable, and it can fail where another notion of
computationalism might succeed, like computability-in-a-ring (Blum, Shub, Smale), or
with diverse sorts of Oracle.
How can you test the proposition that computation can instantiate consciousness?
Brent
To define "exists" by "exists physically" seems to beg the question to me, and also is
not very clear, given that the logic of QM is not boolean, and many want to describe it
as a "knowledge" type of logic (notably by those wanting to avoid the Everett "explosion
of realities").
Bruno
Brent
Still, they say "yes" to the doctor, but only because their artificial brain will be
made of primitive matter. Unlike Craig, they don't ask for special matter like carbon,
but they do ask for some primitive matter. They might ask for some God instead, of
course. It is almost a use of "matter" as a god for creating a gap in the explanation,
and if primitive matter existed, they can make that logical point. We cannot prove
them logically wrong, but with the MGA we can shows them to be close to non-sense,
especially if you can distinguish the evidence of the reality of matter with
(impossible) evidence for primitive matter.
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