Pretty good list.
On 5/6/2015 6:23 PM, LizR wrote:
With profound and sincere apologies to Bruno, some people distinguish these two items,
so I thought it might be worthwhile trying to marshall the arguments in one place, and
give them simple names as per the objections to the Chinese Room I seem to recall seeing
in one of DRH's books - "The Systems Reply" and so on.
So, why do some folks consider that "comp1" doesn't lead to "comp2" ?
1. "Arithmetical Realism is wrong" - the view that maths is something we made up. This
might be true, but imho it has (so far) failed to convincingly explain away that pesky
"unreasonable effectiveness".
I've never understood the "unreasonable effectiveness" argument. ISTM that the
effectiveness is evidence that we made it up. First, since /*we*/ are creatures of this
world what */we/* make will have some effectiveness in this world just because of
evolution and natural selection. Second, much of mathematics was invented specifically to
solve problems in this world - so is it any surprise that it's effective? Third, there is
a lot of "game" mathematics that is only effective in proving things about an invented realm.
I would say the best argument for arithmetical realism (especially arithmetic) is that it
is ubiquitous and facts about it seem to be discovered. But I don't think this is strong
argument.
2. "Pronouns" - only one person takes this seriously, and has been unable to convince
anyone else (so far) but in theory there might be something wrong with using pronouns
when talking about matter duplication (or AI programme duplication, or MWI experimenter
duplication...)
I think there is something wrong with */some/* uses of pronouns. What's wrong is that
they implicitly assume that there is an entity with temporal continuity that can be
identified as "you". But this depends on a theory of personal identity that become
problematic in the presence of duplicating machines. Bruno seems to say that if M and W
have the same memories about all events prior to t, then M and W are the same person, or
maybe just the same person before t? But do they have to have ALL the same memories;
aren't their degrees of sameness? And is it really only memories? Duplication is better
understood for a computer based AI, but that opens the possibility of duplicating exactly
the same memory, but having a slight variation in the processor.
However I don't think these seriously impact the argument because personal identity is
really based on bodies and Bruno's theory proposes to replace our concept of bodies with
something based on computation anyway.
3. "Everything in the light cone" - the view that consciousness is necessarily an open
system, of which any description must take into account all past influences that may
impinge on it. This is more interesting and persuasive than the first two, imho, but
personally I don't think it's relevant, since if one is going to make a recording of a
series of conscious states one can (in principle) isolate the brain from the outside
world by making a "cut" where signals from the world turn to nerve impulses. One then
has to "merely" record everything at that interface, and all the computations going on
in the brain in response to that input.
But note that the meaning, the reference, of those computations in the brain depend on the
brain not being isolated in the past. Some of them even depend on the evolutionary
history of the species of that brain.
4. The "Necessity of couterfactuals" - the view that any conscious being needs to be
able to handle counterfactuals. This is true in real life, of course, but perhaps not if
one is trying to create a recording of a conscious state. Maudlin goes into this in his
"Olimpia and Klara" thought experiment, in which he constructs a Library of Babel's
worth of completely unnecessary machinery to handle the counterfactuals, then refrains
from actually using it. Istm that this applies to the MGA as well - there is no actual
necessity to deal with cases that don't arise when one is repeatedly running the same
deterministic computer programme, hence this ability isn't needed when replaying a
recording of consciousness.
I don't know which side of this I come down on. But from one point of view the
requirement that consciousness be instantiated by a computation, not just a playback,
leads by extension to the ELC theory.
5. The "Argument from incredulity" - the whole idea is preposterous, so there simply
must be something wrong somewhere! This is yet to be proven for all of modern science,
most of which has been subjected to it at some point.
The argument from incredulity has more punch when it's being used against a reductio.
It's like saying accept my incredible theory or else you'll have to believe this absurdity.
And, for completeness...
6. The "pee-pee" argument, which makes fun of the terminology and insults the ideas
without making any constructive points. I will lump into this arguments that because we
don't have matter duplicators the whole thing fails, and similar ideas. I think we can
dismiss these without further ado.
For convenience, and because I know we like making up our own terminology, I have given
these all handy abbreviations, namely ARW, PN, ELC, NOC, INC and TPPA.
Is there anything I've missed?
I think ultrafinitism is another possibility. And it's not often mentioned, but it's also
possible that consciousness is a computation that depends on the continuum (after all
quantum mechanics does).
Brent
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