On 8/16/2014 11:02 PM, LizR wrote:
On 17 August 2014 17:45, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
On 8/16/2014 10:19 PM, LizR wrote:
On 17 August 2014 07:14, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Both consciousness and physics supervene on the computations, which
exist necessarily. Consciousness does not supervene on the physics.
Yes, I agreed to that. The question was can consciousness supervene on
computations that do not instantiate any physics? I think not.
Would you mind clarifying this? I'm not what it means that consciousness
can only
supervene on computations that instantiate physics. For example - assuming
my brain
is doing computations, how is it instantiating physics? Or did you mean
that the
brain is a physical object, and hence instantiated within physics, so to
speak?
No I mean you need something to think about that has the consistency and
stabiltiy
of an external world. You need to be able to think in terms of objects,
bodies,
motions, numbers, perceptions,... Of course language gives you this, but
you have
some of it prior to language which I think is "hardwired" by evolution.
So you need something to be conscious of - or, not just that - you need something
specific (consistent and stable) to be conscious of. This would appear to be the case -
the world is consistent and stable (ish) - is this related to the white rabbits and
suchlike that are discussed in "Theory of Nothing" ?
And then the other question is can physics supervene on computations
that do
not instantiate any consciousness? I'm not sure about that.
If I read this arright, which I probably don't, this would be equivalent to
comp
generating universes with no observers, which I imagine is by definition
impossible.
Yes, that's what it would mean. But if comp can't generate universes with
no
observers what does it mean that there were no people (or even jumping
spiders) for
most of the duration of the universe?
Indeed. This is generally my objection to theories that /require/ conscious observers
(and also my objection to people who say 1+1=2 is a human invention, by the way, since
the laws of physics, which appear to be based on arithmetic, still worked fine without
any conscious beings to "invent" them).
But that's because we invented them to work that way. We invented language to describe
things as we seen them and then we make inferences from it.
And what about distant parts of the universe that we can't observe? And
do we have
to actually *be* observing for them to exist? Do we suppose that they
don't exist
or do we take or theories of cosmology that indicate they should exist as
proof that
there are observers of them?
Yes. Although of course it is hard to get away from us observing them, since everything
we know is what we observe (this might also be the reply of people who think maths is a
human invention, or any sort of invention, to those of us who think they are necessary
even in places we can't observe. It's a bit of a two edged sword.)
Thinking they are necessary is part of our theory of the world. Some of our theories are
about continua and some are about complex numbers, or even quaternions or octonions. I
see no conflict between thinking we have made up these things as part of our model of the
world and extending that model to parts we haven't observed. After all we directly observe
very, very little.
Brent
"I cannot believe that the Moon exists only because a mouse looks at it." --
Albert Einstein
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