On 5/12/2015 8:03 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
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.
Whatever it is, it's what Bruno introduces to distinguish computation from a playback of
computation. I find the idea of states of an extended body like the brain problematic.
The speed of light is finite and the speed of neurons is slow; so to model "the state" as
you propose means modeling it down microseconds or finer in order to capture the signaling
relation between different neurons as their axons transmit pulses across several cm. This
is way below anything that might be considered a 'thought' or a 'conscious momement', so
the later have spacial extent and temporal overlap. To conceive them as separate discrete
states is already to concede that consciousness is in platonia.
Brent
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consciousness could supervene on a recording has been replaced by the claim that the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.
But I think it's jumping to a conclusion to say the supervenience on brain activity is
overwhelming evidence for supervenience on a recording.
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.
But you, and I and others, have not agreed that his MGA shows that. It shows that assuming
consciousness supervenes on the physical processes of a brain implies that it supervenes
on a recording - which he considers an absurdity. So having found a reductio it becomes
question of which step is wrong.
Brent
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