On 24 March 2015 at 07:54, Terren Suydam <terren.suy...@gmail.com> wrote: > For me the MGA was illuminating, but an even more mind-bending demonstration > of the supervenience idea is that one can fashion a Turing-complete computer > using an array of simple mechanical switches, through which ping-pong balls > would flow (see http://helge.ru-stad.name/ppb_comp/ppbcne.htm for example). > > As such, by Church-Turing, you could take whatever computational framework > one might hypothesize necessary to support consciousness (e.g. a simulation > of a human brain), and run it on this ping-pong computer (albeit on a > time-scale many orders of magnitude slower than today's, or even > yesterday's, devices). The physical scale of the ping-pong computer > necessary to run a sophisticated sim like that would be pretty massive too, > to allow for the large amount of 'tape' (Turing) or memory required... but > that's merely a pragmatic point. In principle, it would be computing exactly > the same program as the supercomputer you'd probably commission to run that > sim... and therefore, consciousness would supervene on your ping pong ball > computer. > > As Bruno has said, if that is too absurd, then for you that functions as a > reductio absurdum against the mechanistic hypothesis.
The ping-pong mind is consistent with standard computationalism, which requires a physical computer. It is no more absurd if you think about it than that little bags of water (cells) can form a mind. The MGA, as well as Maudlin's Olympia argument and Putnam's rock argument, claim something more radical: that if computationalism is true then it cannot be the physical activity in the computer that gives rise to consciousness. That means you must either throw out computationalism as a whole as absurd or, less commonly, as Bruno does keep computationalism and throw out the physical supervenience thesis. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
