On 15 August 2014 01:15, Pierz <[email protected]> wrote: > Liz did you ever get to grips with the counterfactuals business? In case > not, the way I would summarize it is this. Consider a computer game in > which you fly through some 3D landscape. The game is "intelligent" because > it can respond to whatever you do with the controls. If you fly in any > direction, it accurately changes the rendered environment to show you what > you see from the new position. The intuition behind computationalism is > that this intelligent responsiveness is what defines consciousness. But now > I can imagine recording someone's flight through the game environment and > replaying it. If I watched the recording, thinking I was playing the game, > and moved the controls in just such a way that the recording showed me the > right scenes by pure chance, I would think the computer was being > intelligent, when in fact it wasn't. Even though it moves through the > correct sequence of visual states, the recording has no intelligent > capacity to deal with counterfactuals, i.e., the possibility of my moving > the controls in some other way from the ones that happen to coincide with > the recording's visuals. So consciousness can't supervene on the mere > sequence of physical states. It has to supervene on more than that, the > actual (abstract) computation including counterfactuals. Maybe you already > got all that, but I thought I'd spell it out... ;) > > OK, so this is an argument that consciousness can't supervene on physical states? Presumably Brent's suggestion that consciousness needs environmental interaction to exist is similar to this? (You need the environment to provide the counterfactualness, I assume).
Please spell things out! I have found quite a few times that an apparent disagreement turns out to be an agreement with linguistic problems, as it were. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
