On 30 Jul 2014, at 16:16, David Nyman wrote:
On 29 July 2014 18:41, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
It is thought as a reductio ad absurdum. If consciousness supervenes
on the physical activity, then it supervenes on the movie, But there
is no computation in the movie, only a description of a computation,
so consciousness does not supervene on the physical activity of the
brain, it supervenes "directly" on the "abstract self-referential
number relation with themselves and with respect to their most
probable universal neighbors, from your laptop to gravitation and
many others.
Yes, that is the only possible move to salvage CTM. But one isn't
forced to take this second step. One could claim that, since there
is no computation in the movie, CTM is thereby falsified.
Of course. But this you can do at any step. Someone could say at step
3, that if comp is true, he will find itself in W and M, and that this
is absurd, so comp is false. Of course, it fails as he does not show
any precise inconsistency.
The game consists in keeping comp all along, to see where the logic
pushes us.
But, since Alice's overt behaviour and hence her relation to her
environment are by assumption unchanged, it might not be
unreasonable to suppose that her consciousness continued to
supervene on the physical activity. Of course a claim of that sort
could no longer be "qua computatio", but in some sense "qua
materia". It's unclear how such a position could be distinguished
from eliminativism about consciousness (at least, pace Brent,
elimination of the possibility of *explanation* beyond physical
parallelism), but it isn't prima facie incoherent.
It would need eliminativism, but it would lake consciousness not
related to evolution and brain, but to something weird, and non
computable. But I just keep comp, all along. It is my job.
That apart, at this point in the argument, assuming one accepts the
reversal and salvages CTM, some things are still not quite clear (at
least to me).
You share this with all honest machines!
For example let's now assume that Alice remains conscious at the
conclusion of the thought experiment, qua computatio.
We reconnect her to the counterfactuals? OK.
What is the nature of the relation between her observable brain
processes and the computations that are supposed to be associated
with her consciousness?
We can't really know them. We can bet on a level of substitution, and
hope they keep the []p right, and pray God for the "& p".
And what is the relation between what is observable in general and
any deeper level we may suppose to be reponsible for it? I tried to
develop some intuition about this latter point with an analogy based
on the distinction between an LCD screen and the movies that could
be presented on it (though unfortunately it seems as if this may
have got mixed up in your response with the movie in the MGA).
Well, there is that "self-multiplication" price, which is worst in
arithmetic than the 10^100 of Bryce deWitt, when understanding Everett
QM.
I expect universal groups winning below the substitution level.
In any case, in my analogy, all the characters and action at the
level of the movie are of course generated at the deeper level of a
rendering engine (which I rather inaccurately called the level of
the screen). Now let's assume that this movie is some futuristic,
fully-immersive, self-interpreting presentation. For the analogy to
hold, the "physical constitution" of the embedded characters and
environments must be fully consistent both with the action at the
level of the movie and the self-interpretation of the characters.
Nonetheless all these internal "observations" and "observables" are
a consequence of a deeper level of "rendering", which itself has no
necessity of isomorphism with anything at the level of observation.
Does the idea of such a level (which must of course be "noumenal" or
unobservable in principle with respect to the "level of internal
observation") still make any sense in comp terms?
Consciousness relates in the truth concerning some relation that
numbers have with the truth, notably, not on any representation of
those truth. A movie does not compute, even if it is a 3D movie of all
the physical happening at a resolution below my susbt level. So it has
no conscousness there, and you don't add it by adding the Klara, as
this would entail magic relation between the gears!
Conscousness is the mental state of the abstract person, in platonia,
and it is related to infinities of histories. So you *can* attribute
consciousness to a body, as long as you distinguish that particular
body instanciation that you "imagine", from the abstract person, who
truly lives, already, so to speak, in platonia. With a movie, you
don't constrain enough that consciousness to manifest itself
relatively to you, except indirectly. It is like a book. You need a
relatively stable universal machine to make a consciousness, which
lives in platonia, to incarnate itself through references and self-
references.
Bruno
David
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