meekerdb wrote:
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.
Need I quote Hume at you, Brent? That which we know as causality is
nothing more than the constant conjunction of events. You make
'causality' into a sort of dualist magic.
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the idea that consciousness could supervene on a recording has been
replaced by the claim that the recording is not a computation of the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.
C'mon, Brent. It's a thought experiment. The fact that we don't have
experimental evidence of conscious recordings is irrelevant to this
particular thought experiment.
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.
Bruno does make a prediction that can be empirically tested. He predicts
that consciousness does not supervene on physical brains but on
computations. The MGA purports to show that the assumption of physical
supervenience leads to a contradiction. But supervenience of
consciousness on brains is an indisputable empirical result, so the MGA
works against comp.
Bruce
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