LizR wrote:
On 24 April 2015 at 09:54, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 4/23/2015 1:03 AM, LizR wrote:
The discussion was originally about step 3 in the comp argument.
Obviously if we've moved onto something else then comp may not
be relevant, however, if we are still talking about comp then
the question of importance is whether a brain is Turing emulable
at any level (which includes whether physics is Turing
emulable). If it is, then either the argument goes through, or
one of Bruno's other premises is wrong, or there is a mistake in
his argument.
Well, maybe Bruno can clarify. He always says that physics and
consciousness are not computable; they are some kind of sum or
average over countably infinite many threads going through a
particular state of the UD. So it's not that clear what it means
that the brain is Turing emulable in Bruno's theory, even if it is
Turing emulable in the materialist theory. That's part of my
concern that the environment of the brain, the physics of it is
relation to the environment, is what makes it not emulable because
its perception/awareness is inherently adapted to the environment by
evolution. Bruno tends to dismiss this as a technicality because
one can just expand the scope of the emulation to include the
environment. But I think that's a flaw. If the scope has to be
expanded then all that's proven in step 8 is that, within a
simulated environment a simulated consciousness doesn't require any
real physics - just simulated physics. But that's almost trivial. I
say "almost" because it may still provide some explanation of
consciousness within the simulation.
I think you'll find that consciousness isn't computable /if you assume
all the consequences of comp/. But once you've assumed all that, you've
already had to throw out materialism, including brains, so the question
is meaningless.
That seems odd to me. The starting point was that the brain was Turing
emulable (at some substitution level). Which seems to suggest that
consciousness (usually associated with brain function) is Turing
emulable. If you find at the end or your chain of reasoning that
consciousness isn't computable (not Turing emulable?), it seems that you
might have hit a contradiction.
Bruce
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