On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:29:05AM +1200, LizR wrote: > > > Yes, although ISTM that a recording doesn't perform a general-purpose > computation, but only - at most - a specific one. But given determinism, > I'm not sure whether that matters or not. >
Yes, of course a recording is quite a specific (or restricted) sort of computation, as I have mentioned. The trouble is that without a more refined understanding of what consciousness is, we cannot just sweepingly state that it is not a conscious recording. I suspect the way to do so is to mount an argument along the lines Brent point out - that a consciousness needs to be aware of something (which we can call the environment for the sake of fixing terms), and to be aware of that something requires being responsive to the counterfactual nature of the environment, which a recording clearly isn't. Something along those lines is needed, otherwise the MGA is simply an appeal to intuition, a rhetorical argument, as it were. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
