On 22 May 2015, at 10:34, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Friday, May 22, 2015, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 21 May 2015, at 01:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
Partial zombies are absurd because they make the concept of
consciousness meaningless.
OK.
Random neurons, separated neurons and platonic computations
sustaining consciousness are merely weird, not absurd.
Not OK. Random neurone, like the movie, simply does not compute.
They only mimic the contingent (and logically unrelated) physical
activity related to a special implementation of a computation. If
you change the initial computer, that physical activity could mimic
another computation. Or, like Maudlin showed: you can change the
physical activity arbitrarily, and still mimic the initial
computation: so the relation between computation, and the physical
activity of the computer running that computation is accidental, nor
logical.
Platonic computation, on the contrary, does compute (in the original
sense of computation).
You're assuming not only that computationalism is true, but that
it's exclusively true.
That is part of the definition, and that is why I add often that we
have to say "yes" to the doctor, in virtue of surviving "qua
computatio". I have often try to explain that someone can believe in
both Church thesis, and say yes to the doctor, but still believe in
this not for the reason that the artficial brain will run the relevant
computation, but because he believes in the Virgin Mary, and he
believes she is good and compensionate, so that if the artificial
brain is good enough she will save your soul, and reinstall it in the
digital physical brain. That is *not* computationalism. It is
computationalism + magic.
Go back several steps and consider why we think computationalism
might be true in the first place. The usual start is that computers
can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain.
OK.
So if something else can behave intelligently and substitute for
processes in the brain, it's not absurd to consider that it might be
conscious. It's begging the question to say that it can't be
conscious because it isn't a computation.
The movie and the lucky random brain are different in that respect.
The movie doesn't behave like if it was conscious. I can tell the
movie that mustard is a mineral, or an animal, the movie does not
react. it fails at the Turing tests, and the zombie test. There is
neither computations, nor intelligent behaviors, relevant with the
consciousness "associated' to the boolean circuit.
The "inimagibly lucky" random brain, on the contrary, does behave in
a way making a person acting like a p-zombie or a conscious
individual. We don't see the difference with a conscious being, by
definition/construction.
Well, if a random event mimics by chance a computation, that means at
the least that the computation exists (in arithmetic), and I suggest
to associate consciousness to it.
Then if I have the way to learn that from time t1 to time t2 the
neuron fired randomly, but correctly, by chance, that would only add
to my suspicion that the physical activity has some relationship with
consciousness. It is just a relative implementation of the abstract
computation. That one should have its normal measure guarantied by the
statistical "sum" on all computations below its substitution level.
Now, the movie was a constructive object. A brain which is random but
lucky is equivalent with a white rabbit event, and using it in a
thought experiment might not convey so much. In this case, it seems to
make my point that we need very special event, infinite luck or Virgin
Mary, to resist the consequence of the idea that our consciousness is
invariant for Turing-equivalence. Matter becomes then the symptom that
some numbers win some (self) measure theoretical game. Comp suggests
we can explain the appearances and relative persistence of physical
realities from a statistical bio or psycho or theo -logy. And that is
confirmed by the "interview of the Löbian machine" (by the results of
Gödel, Löb, Solovay, Visser, ...).
Bruno
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Stathis Papaioannou
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