On 8/15/2014 4:34 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Friday, August 15, 2014, LizR <[email protected] <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[email protected]');>> wrote:On 15 August 2014 12:40, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: If counterfactual correctness and causal environmental reference are not needed for consciousness then consciousness will be instantiated by any sequence of states, OK. From which I can only deduce that either consciousness isn't related (purely) to classical computational states, but requires some extras, or it can be instantiated in ANY sequence of states that meet some set of criteria, regardless of whether these occur in a rock or a Boltzmann brain or whatever. (Or indeed in a book called "Einstein's Brain" that I read about in another book by Doug Hofstadter.)I think these sorts of considerations show that the physical states cannot be responsible for generating or affecting consciousness.
How do they show that? I thought they only showed that CC and environmental reference were necessary to consciousness. Are you assuming that the playback of a recording IS conscious?
The immediate objection to this is that physical changes in the brain *do* affect consciousness. But if physical states cannot be responsible for generating or affecting consciousness, there can be no evidence for a separate, fundamental physical world. What we are left with is the platonic reality in which all computations are realised and physical reality is a simulation.It is meaningless to ask if consciousness supervenes on the computations implemented on the simulated rock or the simulated recording.
It's not meaningless to ask if there must be simulated physics for the simulated consciousness to supervene on. Do you think you could be conscious of a world with no physics?
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