On 06 Oct 2015, at 20:14, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 10/6/2015 10:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
It's not clear to me who is arguing for what. Stathis may think
that consciousness is independent of it's physical substrate, but
I don't see that he's arguing that here. He's arguing that there
can be more that one instance of "the same" consciousness.
Yes, like for example when you are duplicated at W and M, but still
in the box, before opening the box. There are two instantiation of
the same consciousness. From the 1p view, the person can be
consistently said to be unique, at both place at once. Once she
opens the door, she get the bit of information which differentiate
her from her doppelganger.
But this is inconsistent with QM. Your view of conscious thoughts
as instantiated by computation implicitly assumes deterministic,
classical evolution of the brain, so that two identical brains with
identical perceptual inputs will have identical thought sequences,
in analogy to two computers running the same program. As the
computations are instantiated in arithmetic they are necessarily a
unity, as there can be only a single number 2.
But the computation is emulated by the number relations, and it is
easy to prove that each piece of computation is emulated an infinity
of times, and can diverge because the computations can get different
inputs, or be subrelations of different relations. The UD run all
programs on all inputs, including all real streams.
But QM says that the brains will very quickly (microseconds)
diverge. So if duplication were possible this could provide a test
of your theory - do the duplicate's thoughts diverge even before the
door is opened.
It should not, because it is plausible that the position of air
molecules will not significantly change my first person state, but it
might (that depends on the level). Comp and QM are the same on this:
the unicity of a computation depends only on the isolation of that
computations. A notion of sharable experiences ask that interaction
multiplies the states of the objects involved, and that is given by
the linearity of the tensor product.
Of course duplication of brains or people is not possible - but
duplication of computers is.
Let us say duplication of there program. A physical computer is not
really duplicable too.
Computers are deliberately designed to act deterministically; we
want them to instantiate arithmetic, not QM. Yet they do
instantiate QM and although they will not diverge quickly, they too
will diverge.
OK. Why would that be a problem? I am not sure I see your point here.
Bruno
Brent
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