On 5/12/2015 4:26 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
meekerdb wrote:
On 5/11/2015 11:14 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
[BM] Why? Have you proven that consciousness supervenes on a record?
Have you proven that it does not?
No, but I have a lot of evidence it supervenes on brain /*processes*/. Reducing that
to /*states*/ is a further assumption.
That is the pedant's reply. :-)
A process reduces to a sequence of states -- you simply lower the substitution level
(step rate) to whatever value is necessary to reproduce the process FAPP.
No, a sequence of states is not the same as a process. In a process the states in the
sequence are causally related. In playing back a *digitized* recording of states the
causal relation is broken. But, as I pointed out to Bruno, "causal" is a nomological, not
logical, relation. He, of course, disagreed.
The assumption of the argument was that consciousness supervenes on the brain state.
That's not the same as saying yes to the doctor. It's your added interpretation that
consciousness supervenes on a brain state as opposed to a brain process that
constitutes a computation. Bruno, who made the argument, I think is relying on the
latter.
Yes, that seems to be the case. The original claim of absurdity for the idea that
consciousness could supervene on a recording has been replaced by the claim that the
recording is not a computation of the required kind. This also begs the question of
course -- where is it proved that that particular type of computation is both necessary
and sufficient for consciousness?
It's just hypothesized as implicit in saying yes to the doctor; one would only say yes if
it were a counterfactually correct AI.
However, I think one can approach this in a different way. The overwhelming evidence
from neuroscience, and all related experimentation, is that consciousness supervenes on
the physical brain -- the goo in our skulls. Damage the goo, stimulate the goo, do
anything to the goo, and our qualia or consciousness are altered. Alter our
consciousness/thinking/processing and there are associated changes in the brain
activity/states. (Pet scans and the like.)
The MGA argues that the natural sequence of brain states and a recording of that
sequence are not equivalent in that one is conscious and the other is not. It is
concluded from this that consciousness does not supervene on the brain states/processes,
which conclusion is contradicted by the overwhelming bulk of experimental evidence.
I agree with you and Russell that it is not obvious that consciousness can't supervene on
a playback of a recording. But, I don't think there's any empirical evidence regarding
recordings of brains. In fact one of Russell's points is that the fact that such a
recording would be so large and detailed is a reason not to trust intuitions about whether
it could be conscious.
This is science. When your theory is contradicted by overwhelming experimental evidence,
it is conventionally taken as evidence that your theory has been falsified. The MGA puts
Bruno's theory in this category: it has been falsified by the experimental results.
Would that it were so. But so far as I can see Bruno's theory doesn't make any definite
predictions that can be empirically tested. It explains a few things: quantum
randomness=FPI and you can't know what program you are. But these things also have other
possible explanations and they were already known.
Brent
Bruce
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