On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 02:48:47AM +0200, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: > > I still don't see what MGA "pumps intuitively and incorrectly", as you seem > to assume that MGA is "bad" intuition pump, rather than "good" one that > facilitates seeing something tricky. You've not shown that consciousness > supervenes on broken gates, you don't treat movies like conscious entities, > and haven't pointed towards a recording that is obviously or demonstrably > conscious. >
It is one thing to argue intuitively that playing Casablanca does not instantiate Humphrey Bogart's consciousness. That I would happily agree with. It only involves a few 100KB per second. It is another thing to argue that a precise recording of the firings of every neuron in someone's brain similarly doesn't instantiate consciousness (at around 10^11 neurons per typical human brain, this would be something of the order of 10^16 bytes per second). This is the sort of recording being used in Maudlin's thought experiment/MGA. And obviously, according to COMP, a huge lookup table encoding the machine's output for every possible input for a machine implementing a conscious moment (which is just another type of recording, albeit a very complex one that would exceed the Seth LLoyd bound for the universe) must be conscious. Note this latter type of device was used in Searles Chinese Room argument, and I think needs to be answered the same way Dennett answers the Chinese Room argument. At some point on the complexity scale, recordings go from being not conscious to conscious. Where do you draw the line? I'm afraid intuition does not help much in this matter, which is why I say it is a weakness of the MGA. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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.
