On 15 August 2014 12:50, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote:
> The consequence of assuming that counterfactuals make no difference in > your supervenience thesis is that it implies consciousness supervenes > on a recording. I constantly stumbled over this point too, as it is not > adequately spelled out in typical formulations of the computational > supervenience thesis. > Yes, I see that. > > For some, that is a bridge too far. Maybe you could try following > Bruno's "stroboscope argument" to see if that persuades. (Not sure if > there's an English language version about, though). > I seem to remember coming across that somewhere, can't remember how it goes though (hint! :-) > > Where Brent and I differ from the usual interpretation is that we > don't think counterfactuals are irrelevant to the physical > supervenience thesis either. That is because the physical world is > fundamentally quantum, and for all intents and purposes acts as a > Multiverse, so the counterfactuals are just as physically real as the > factuals. > With the multiverse I can grok this, it's only when we assume classical computation that I don't get the point. The quantum version implies that consciousness isn't classical, not that it has some sort of quantum magic, but that it's (as it were) a cut-down version of a larger phenomenon. There are multiple I's, or rather one big monstrous ego that (perhaps fortunately) isn't aware of most of itself. Starting from that basis and trying to show how our apparent single valued consciousness drops out i neach Everett world would no doubt be an interesting project, though one the margins of my brain are, unfortunately, not large enough to contain. But maybe some genius could have a go, and might even be able to come up with a purely quantum-materialist version (maybe even one in which 17 is only prime because we think it is...) > > But the MGA does show a contradiction between the physical and > computational supervenience thesis in a classical, low resource (aka > non-robust) physical reality, and this suffices to handle the > non-robust case of the UDA (aka step 8). > I'm getting confused again. Is step 8 the one where the universe isn't big enough to contain a UD which creates all human experiences, and so we set course for arithmetical realism? > > -- 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.
