On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 05:12:02PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > This reminds me of Putnam's "a rock implements every finite state > machine" argument. According to some one time pad the rock implements > any computation, but this is obviously useless as a computer, and no > more interesting than saying that a block of marble contains every > possible statue. But consider the case where the computation > implemented is a self-contained virtual environment or an entity > dreaming without inputs or outputs. This cannot be dismissed so easily > as it is not dependent on an external interpretation. >
This example is definitely related, and may well provide another way to approach the MGA without the inherent problems we've been discussing. Accepting that the rock does indeed implement any possible machine via the one-time pad, we can see that with COMP, this entails the existence of all possible experiences in this one rock universe. Each computation implementing a conscious observer provides its own interpretation as observer and environment. But it is also true that the conscious observers do not supervene on the rock, for largely the Alice & Bob in the classroom reason. A differing conscious moment is also implemented by the rock, via a different one-time pad, but the rock is invariable in all cases. So we have a primitive physical ontology, but primtive physical supervenience is false. Nothing is said about the actual physical supervenience, however - it is still quite possible that the conscious moments do supervene on the observed physics generated by the computation. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
