On 6/12/2014 7:03 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 13 June 2014 02:42, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
Simply because you can give something you call a "basic accounting" of a
painting by specifying the placement of pigments on a canvas doesn't
preclude also describing it as a Monet of water lillies. You've chosen a
level and called it "basic" and then complain that it leaves something out.
I'd say it's just incomplete.
You're right, it doesn't preclude it, but neither does it demand it.
The painting wouldn't be any the less what it is *physically* were it
to remain uninterpreted in perpetuity.
Yes it would. Physics is interaction - not just existence, and in fact QM teaches us that
*things* don't exist without interacting. That's where I think Bruno's step 8 is
misleading. If pursued rigorously I think it would require a whole world to implement all
the counterfactuals. And if you only prove that an artificial consciousness can exist in
an artificial world you have proved much except that "artificial" is relative.
The point is that the
"completion" (i.e. the interpretation of the pigments on canvas as a
particular work by Monet) is a supernumerary epistemological
consequence that is not required (in the strict terms of this view) to
singularise or otherwise determine the physical state of affairs.
I think you are assuming the point in question, i.e. that all the physical interactions of
brains with the painting and the rest of the world are irrelevant and that the "physical"
description of the painting is *just* the pigment on the canvas. You take all that other
interaction, which also has both physical and psychological description and leave it out
and then you say the physical description leaves out something essential. That seems to
imply that you believe philosophical zombies are possible?
Brent
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