On 09 Jul 2014, at 04:03, meekerdb wrote:
On 7/8/2014 6:14 PM, LizR wrote:
On 9 July 2014 12:36, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
the proof that mga gives is a reductio assumibg it's the physical
instantiation that gives the computation reality. The conscious
computation is assumed at the start given the requirement that we
are in a computationalist settings...
Yes, it assumes a computation can have meaning in itself without
referents.
Aren't the referents supplied by recording the original
computation? But I'm not sure what "meaning" is here. Do brain
cells have meaning while operating, or is it something that emerges
from their operation?
But that seems like a dubious assumption to me. How then do you
answer the paradox of the conscious rock?
Do you need to? Rocks apparently emerge from infinite computational
traces in comp anyway...! (So perhaps they can support
consciousness acccording to comp, or at least they can instantiate
some of the infinite computations that support it?)
mga is about physical instantiation.
That's what I said. And I think it fails to show that no physical
instantiation is necessary because it relies on the meaning given
to the original computational sequence to impute meaning to the MG.
This is a good point, and one I think I have got my head around
now. However, it appears to imply that meaning is the "supernatural
extra stuff" I mentioned earlier, which is supposed to
differentiate an original computation from a replay.
So suppose we have a conscious computer frozen in state S1. We
start it running and let it interact with its environment via, say,
a body in the form of a Mars Rover. We record all the inputs it
receives from its sensors, incoming signals from anywhere else,
etc. After say 10 minutes we stop the recording and we turn to
another computer, on Earth, with no body, also in state S1, and now
we play back the inputs we recorded from teh first one. Why would
the second computer not behave exactly like the first one,
believing that it's interacting with the surface of Mars? And if it
does, why would it be any less conscious than the first one?
I'd say that if it instantiates conscious, thoughts then they take
their meaning from Mars, even though it's "second hand". Maudlin
adds extra machinery to provide counterfactual computations. This
must assume interaction with some environment in order that the
counterfactual events can be defined.
You miss the point. maudlin extra-machinery to get the a machine which
is counterfactually correct, yet the machinery will not interact and
be physically inactive for the precise computation considered. maudlin
shows that we can incarnate any particular computations with basically
any physical activity (and indeed I showed we can diminish the
physical activity up to nothing).
Or looked at another way, suppose there were a different Europa
rover which had different sensors and programs and actuators, but by
coincidence of it's interaction with the environment it happened to
have a sequence of inputs and outputs from it's cpu exactly the same
as a sequence that occurred in Mars rover. So when the sequence is
played back in a simulation on Earth, does the simulation
experience being on Mars or on Europa?
Or am I missing the point?
Dunno. My point is that consciousness may be more holistic than
supposed, i.e. it depends on environment and maybe even on the
evolutionary history.
That is close to the comp consequence, where consciousness depends on
all possible environments, and on all possible computations going
through classes of states (corresponding to stable enough first person
experiences). An environment is always a universal machine in *your*
or our (first person plural) neighborhoods. The cooperation makes
rarer the individual relative aberant continuation, plausibly. To
stabilize on individual histories, consciousness might require some
depth (in Bennett sense of (simplifying a lot) intrinsic long runtime
computations) and requires or cannot avoid, the big "self"-
multiplication).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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