On 13 May 2015, at 05:03, 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.
Well, thanks Bruce!
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been replaced by the claim that the recording is not a computation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.
Again! OK. Good.
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.
Consciousness is not testable, ever. But The UDA+MGA can be translated
into arithmetic, by using mainly Gödel's technic, and this leads to
the extraction of physics. just accepting a very classical account of
knowledge (by Theaetetus), we can, and have, already derived the
propositional physics. We fond quantum logic, up to now.
So UDA predicts and explains the appearance of the MWI, for almost all
universal machines, and
AUDA makes it possible to verify this mathematically, and it predicts
and explain the quantum logic, from just the Peano axioms of arithmetic.
MGA would works against comp, if Gödel's and Everett's works did not
rescue it.
Bruno
Bruce
--
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.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
