On 8/17/2014 8:49 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Sunday, August 17, 2014, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 8/16/2014 10:16 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:On 16 August 2014 10:16, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 8/15/2014 4:34 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > 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? If it is true that a recording is conscious or the random states of a rock are conscious then I think that does imply that physical states are irrelevant to consciousness. But the argument goes that this irrelevance of physical states is absurd, so some restriction is imposed on what can be conscious in order to avoid the absurdity. One possible restriction is that consciousness only occurs if the computations are implemented relative to an environment, another is that the counterfactuals be present. But these are ad hoc restrictions, no better than saying that consciousness can only occur in a biological substrate. > > 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? 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.I think that a sustained stream of consciousness will probably be part of a computation that instantiates physics - instantiates a whole universe complete with physics.
That's answering the converse question. So if the early universe was instantiated by a computation (a computation that instantiated physics) then you think that part of the early universe was a sustained stream of consciousness. How do you conceive of this consciousness' relation to the physics? For example might it be some structure in the inflaton field? Or do you think of it as separate from physical structures?
However, the point that I wanted to make was that if computation can instantiate consciousness then there is nothing to stop a recording, a Boltzmann Brain, a rock and so on from doing so; for these possibilities have been used as arguments against computationalism or to arbitrarily restrict computationalism.
Why is it arbitrary to say that a computation that is very simple, has not possible branchings for example, cannot be conscious while some more complex computation, one controlling an autonomous Mars Rover for example, may be? Do you agree with Bruno that consciousness is all-or-nothing?
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