On 13 May 2015, at 07:45, Bruce Kellett wrote:
LizR wrote:
On 13 May 2015 at 15:03, Bruce Kellett <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]
>> 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.
It does, as usually "supervenience" in philosophy of mind means
"primitively-physical supervenience", and it should be clear that this
is what is at stake.
Step 0 and 1 makes clear that we do agree that comp, if true, is
realized through some physical supervenience (at that stage, we are
neutral on the primitiveness of that physical aspect).
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.
yes. In the worst case of some consciousness superverning on the
movie, it might be the consciousness of a mosquito (but frankly, I
think that an amoeba is more conscious than such a movie).
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.
Are you claiming that the movie is not only conscious, but that it is
the same consciousness (in different time) than the original boolean
graph?
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.
For an Aristotelian who believes a priori in a primitive physical
universe. But there is no evidence at all for a primitive physical
supervenience, which is the only thing at stake.
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.
