On 9/24/2014 12:33 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2014-09-24 8:58 GMT+02:00 meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>: On 9/23/2014 10:52 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:And I said it was also functionalism, because it was suggested that copying the arrangement of matter in the same fashion would result in the same consciousness... that could be false even under materialism (because it could be impossible to rearrange matter in the desired way infinitesimally and that no scale was specified at which two arrangement are the same).QM's no cloning theorem says it would be impossible to make a copy of a brain, a copy faithful to the quantum state. And I think that making an imperfect copy, as QM would permit, would very likely make a difference in the stream of consciousness. In other words the Washington man and the Moscow man, even assuming they were as perfect copies as QM allows, would have divergent thoughts even before they opened the door of their transporter booth. Does this make any difference to the argument - I don't think so.If infinite precision is required, computationalism is obviously false... The level in Bruno's argument can be arbitrary low, it can't be infinitely low... and if it involves duplicating the entire causal universe, it would likely point toward computationalism being false and unhelpful to explain anything.
We're not talking about *infinite precision*, as in real valued computations. The quantum state may well be finitely definable, yet it still can't be cloned (except by accident). So it's not obvious to me that first-person-indeterminancy is removed by the no-cloning theorem. The Moscow man and the Washington man would both still remember being from Helsinki and they would still be "that same person" in terms of every possible objective test.
But I do agree about the scope of duplication and in fact I think the holistic character of quantum entanglement implies that duplication would have to include at least a considerable part of the local spacetime and that this does imply computationalism is not so radical as it at first seems, even if it's true.
And the only thing I wanted to convey is that I disagree with John Clark assertion about his definition of what is computationalism... his definition about matter arrangement has nothing to do about computationalism.I wonder if Bruno's UD model of the world implies the same no-cloning theorem?Yes, any piece of matter under Bruno's model is non-cloneable, only because *matter* is an invariant of the infinity of computations supporting your conscious state here and now.
I'll have to think about that. Brent -- 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.
