On 8/11/2014 5:13 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 12:22 AM, LizR <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Having now read the paper,
Ok, I finished it too. Russell's "state of the art" is a very nice introduction to the
MGA and Maudlin's argument. Very clear and concise, helped me organize my thoughts on these.
ISTM that the "counterfactual" part of the argument is the only part that I
/really/
don't get. Or rather ISTM that it demonstrates that consciousness can't
supervene on
physical computational states, because those states can't know anything
about these
counterfactuals, which by definition don't happen.
I think the point here is that if we assume consciousness supervenes on matter, then we
are forced to reject comp, by reductio ad absurdum.
I think the mistake, the reductio, is the assumption that consciousness can supervene on
this piece of matter without reference to the world in which the matter exists. This
fallacy is encouraged by considering conscious thoughts to be about abstractions like
arithmetic and dreams (as though dreams did not derive from reality).
Brent
Any computation supported by matter on which consciousness would supervene could be
replaced with a dumb playback of the sequence of states produced by the computation
(contradicting comp). In the Klara / Olympia case, Olympia could be made compatible with
comp by being replaceable by Klara to deal with counterfactuals that would never happen.
Enabling / disabling the Olympia / Klara connection would turn consciousness on or off
(contradicting primitive matter, because the possibility of enabling material
computations that would never happen would determine the presence of absence of
consciousness).
I am writing this to help organize my own thoughts, and hope to be corrected if I am
making a mistake.
Then again, I also have some trouble with the multiverse part. A MV "is" a
quantum
computer? How do we know that, without even knowing the laws of physics?
I think Russell is referring to a MWI multiverse which is necessarily a quantum computer
(we are assuming the wave equation with MWI, so the laws of physics are known).
I am not convinced that the MWI + the anthropic principle is equivalent to the subset of
the universal dovetailer computations that supports all possible human experiences. I am
also not convinced that the set of all possible human experiences is finite. Russell,
could you elaborate on these?
(I am going to comment on the blog post too, in a rather redundant way)
Cheers
Telmo.
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