On 02 Apr 2015, at 05:34, Russell Standish wrote:
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.
The intuition pump is that the recording does not contain any
computation, which is embarassing for a theory of mind requiring a
computation. With stroboscope like argument, such a computation is
not even well defined, nor is the time at which the movie is executed.
As for the looking-table, it need to be infinite if it implements a
universal machine. Consciousness, with comp, can be given to whatever
brought that looking table into existence.
More on this mater, surely. The problem for the materialist is that he
has no material definition of computation. It is always an act of
faith in some primitive matter, and then an exploitation of the
mathematical notion of computation, and of the fact that "matter"
seems ... Turing universal. Again, it gives magical abilities to
Turing machine, and entails the existence of infinitely many zombies
in arithmetic. More on this, as I write very quickly (soory for
possible typo) as I have to go now.
Bruno
Cheers
--
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Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret
(http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html)
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