On 3/23/2015 5:46 PM, LizR wrote:
On 24 March 2015 at 13:15, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:On 3/23/2015 3:59 PM, LizR wrote:On 24 March 2015 at 11:08, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: Or you can throw out the assumption that conscious thought is independent of an external world.This assumption comes easily to Platonist because they think Platonia exists independent of any worlds; but I find it very suspicious. Doesn't that take you back to the starting point of Bruno's argument? If conscious thought depends on the world, then either it's a computation, or part of one (apparently the argument works even if you have to assume the HUbble sphere is digitally simulatable, if that's the right word) - in which case we seem led inexorably to the UDA/MGA/TLA - or it's something else. What else could it be?The difference is that you can't separate out a material instantiation of a computation and say that because it can be inert that shows that consciousness doesn't need matter. If consciousness is computation then it can be implemented in different substances, but there must be a whole world implemented in that substance too for the consciousness to be conscious OF. The projected sequence of the MGA isn't conscious in this world because it doesn't interact with this world. We tend to intuit that it's conscious because we see the causal connection to this world, but to be conscious it would have to be part of a whole projected world in which it acted. This is not longer so radical. It's just saying to could digitally simulate a world and conscious beings within it. The simulation might look inert to us in our world, as it would if it were just written out on paper, but from within the simulation it would look dynamic.I think you've answered your own objection there. There's no reason (in principle) for the world not to be simulated, I assume.
Right. In which case there's also no meaning to saying it is simulated. To be simulated is only meaningful when it is relative to a really real world.
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