On 11 May 2015 at 04:41, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 5/10/2015 3:58 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > > On 10 May 2015 at 08:59, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> 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.
It observes itself if it is dreaming, or it observes the virtual environment. If it observes its virtual environment, there is no necessity that that either the observer or the environment interact with the world at the level of the substance of their implementation. > 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 > -- > 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. > > > -- > 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. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
