On 5/10/2015 3:58 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 10 May 2015 at 08:59, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote:
> In fact physical systems are not capable of computation at all,
> without an observer to provide symbolic meaning to the activity. After
> all, what's going on in a PC or Mac are actually changes in analogue
> voltage levels, where the engineers designate certain voltage ranges
> as 0 or 1. (eg <1v means 0 and > 2v means 1, with in between levels
> indeterminate).
The interesting thing about this is to consider what happens when the physical system is
implementing a conscious computation. One could claim that any physical system
implements any computation under some mapping of system states to computational states,
but an objection to this is that it is, if not false, vacuous, because the "computer"
cannot interact with its environment. For example, it can't be used to provide us the
result of a calculation, because the result must already be known in order to know the
mapping.
But if the computation implements a consciousness with no interaction with the
environment, that objection fails: the computation creates its own observer,
But what does it observe? I think an environment is necessary - not necessarily at the
moment, but to provide reference/meaning to the computation that is conscious.
Brent
and it doesn't make any difference if no-one at the level of the substrate of its
implementation can understand it.
This argument has been used as a reductio by Hilary Putnam and John Searle, among
others, to show that computationalism must be false. The conclusion is that the
consciousness cannot supervene on computation since otherwise it would have to supervene
on any physical system at all. This is analogous to Maudlin's conclusion that
consciousness cannot supervene on computation because otherwise it would supervene on a
recording. But there is an alternative, and that is that consciousness does supervene on
computation, but not on a physical implementation of computation. If this is granted,
there is no reductio ad absurdum (assuming you do think the conclusions are absurd) with
either Putnam's argument or Maudlin's argument.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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