On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 8:36 AM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]> wrote:
> meekerdb wrote: > >> On 3/28/2015 12:33 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote: >> >>> meekerdb wrote: >>> >>> As I said, conterfactual correctness has very little to do with the >>> actual conscious moment. That is given simply by the sequence of actual >>> brain states -- >>> >> >> But what is "a brain state". Can a part of the brain be ignored in some >> state but not in another? >> > > Yes. See my previous comments about brain injuries, stroke, and suchlike. > > this sequence does not really calculate anything. Computationalism >>> ultimately rests on a confusion between a simulation and the calculations >>> necessary to produce that simulation. >>> >> >> Computationalism is just the idea that conscious thought can be >> instantiated by digital device that simulates the brain at some >> sufficiently detailed level. If such a simulation is possible then it can >> be realized by a program running on a universal Turing machine. But that's >> an abstract process in Platonia and is independent of any physics or >> material existence. That's what the MGA purports to show. >> > > Bruno has acknowledged that this is not what the MGA shows. MGA simply > shows that his version of computationalism is incompatible with physical > supervenience. This cannot be seen as surprising since it is explicitly > built into computationalism that physicalism is false. The MGA is, > therefore, largely irrelevant, because it does not prove anything that we > didn't already know. I'm not so sure. Your posts seem to obscure distinctions between calculation, computation, and computability while assuming physicalism... which is abandoned by "yes doctor" and has weakness in the mind-body department. Even if we assume primitive existence of neural mechanisms we still have to address at this point the elephant of consciousness/mind arising and some functional relationship between the two levels. Mechanism itself is an abstract concept. Why a functional relationship at all? Yes, we see brains in scans and autopsies, but I have yet to see a pure ideal function, or as Brent's funky comic suggested "number 5 (or whatever it was) out in the wild". ;-) That definitions you nail as "relevant only to computer scientists", is a claim that is not holdable in that form either. First because science is not a majority vote and because say Mostowski's framing of computation as syntactic, purely formal concept and computability as a semantic, intuitive concept translates well into linguistics, or tactics and strategy in the game of chess, with many more examples... > It certainly does not show that consciousness is an abstract process in > Plationia, independent of any physical process. Yeah, but it doesn't do the opposite either; it merely gives with UD some initial shape of how mind-body could look like if a physicalist assumption doesn't hold sway. Interviewing the self-referential machines and studying their discourse seem up to now to fit with no collapse of wave packet MWI interpretation under the machines' substitution levels. > That was the initial asssumption, and MGA simply shows that you can't have > both computationalism *and* physicalism -- not that physical supervenience > is false. > I'd like to see physical supervenience without function then or we could tell the neurologists they have a functional problem, lol. But these absurd steps would be functional assignments in themselves. And this is also a subject the list might try as an interesting aside: what are the strongest arguments for "primitive what you see is what you get physicalism" (other than transparent utility and the often posted strengths and difficulties of comp...but still mind-body based)? Phenomenology of mind-body is hard for to address without function, abstraction, numbers etc. What reasons do we have to sweep them under the rug and how legitimate are they? Is mind-body itself a flawed way to address phenomenon of consciousness and if so why? PGC -- 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.
