LizR wrote:
On 13 May 2015 at 15:03, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au
<mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> wrote:
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.
I'm not sure that's what Bruno is trying to show, because he knows any
TOE must explain all observations to date, at least in principle, so he
would hardly be making a claim that is obviously refutable (or not for
longer than it took him to notice that it was refutable, I hope).
I think Bruno's argument isn't attempting to refute supervention of the
mind on the brain, but "primary materialism" - but I'm sure he will
correct me if I'm wrong.
That might be the idea. It is difficult to get to this, though, since
the notion of "primary materialism" doesn't really feature in the
argument. Before we get to the MGA, the dovetailer has been introduced,
and this is supposed to emulate the generalized brain (even if the
generalized brain is the whole galaxy or even the entire universe)
infinitely often, and the laws of physics emerge from the statistics of
all UD-computations passing through my actual state.
The argument might then be that since the reconstruction of the brain
states from the filmed recording is not a computation to be found in the
dovetailer, it does not pass through my actual state, so is not part of
what sustains my consciousness. Or something like that.
But I don't think that this move succeeds. Whether the physical universe
and its laws come out of the dovetailer or not, I can set up the
situation in which the sequence of brain states is reproduced from a
recording *in the universe I inhabit*, whatever its ultimate origin. So
talk about primitive materialism and computational dovetailer states are
both equally irrelevant to the actual MGA. The thought experiment can be
carried out, whatever substrate underlies the physical world.
The claim that the sequence of brain states reconstructed from the
recording is not conscious contradicts the physical supervenience
hypothesis, whether the 'physical brain' in this case is made of
primitive matter (whatever that is) or extracted from the infinite
computations of the dovetailer. And physical supervenience in the world
we inhabit has overwhelming empirical support.
Bruce
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