On 10/7/2015 2:30 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 8 Oct 2015, at 4:36 AM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 10/7/2015 2:14 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 7 October 2015 at 17:09, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 10/6/2015 10:39 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 7 October 2015 at 07:51, Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 10/6/2015 1:18 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 6 Oct 2015, at 2:45 PM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 10/5/2015 6:24 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 6 Oct 2015, at 11:29 AM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 10/5/2015 5:14 PM, Stathis
Papaioannou wrote:
From this comment it seems that you
have an odd idea of how a person
survives from moment to moment, as if
they have a soul that needs to be
transferred from one body to the other.
That isn't how it works. If A1 survives
as a later entity A2, it is necessary
and sufficient that A1 and A2 have
certain physical and psychological
properties. No spark or soul needs to
jump from A1 to A2, and they neither
need to have any matter in common nor
do they need to have any physical
continuity, since these factors have no
effect on experience.
I disagree with that last. It's commonly
assumed, because with shut our eyes and
imagine scenes and we can compose dialog in
our heads; but I think it is a mistake to
think these can happen independent of some
underlying physics - even if it's not
"primitive" physics (whatever that is)
which Bruno dismisses.
But lack of physical continuity will not
necessarily make a subjective difference, even
if physics is needed to instantiate consciousness.
Not necessarily if it is at a very low level, e.g.
atoms. But if it's something noticeable, some
difference in hormone levels, ... it will make a
difference in thoughts. If the thought sequence
can different with the things happening at the
physical level of say neurons then it implies that
supervenience is false and the mental and physical
can go their own way (which is what we call
"delusional").
I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at. I
meant that if the normal sequence of brain states is
s1-s2-s3 with corresponding mental states m1-m2-m3 and
s2 is omitted, there is nothing in m3 to give any
indication of the discontinuity. Of course, normally s2
is necessary in order to generate s1, but that doesn't
change the argument.
But I think that's wrong. Brains are not like ideal von
Neumann computers or Turing machines that have "brain
states" corresponding to "mental states". If you
simulated a brain using a computer you would find that an
enormous number of "brain states" were required to
instantiate a single conscious thought and furthermore the
brains states necessary for one thought overlapped with
those necessary for the next thought. So this overlap at
the low level is part of the physical continuity needed for
consciousness. The fact that the physics can be simulated
by discrete computation doesn't imply that the conscious
states are discrete.
If you simulated a brain on a computer and paused the
computation for a while, would it make any difference to the
consciousness generated?
In an ideal computer, like a Turing machine, probably not. But
that's because the brain would have to be simulated on a much
finer time scale than that of conscious thoughts or
experiences. The brain simulation would have include
simulation of neuronal signals in transit and overlapping other
signals with certain timing.
If the brain is Turing emulable then the emulation can be run on a
general purpose computer, such as the one I am using now, provided
it has enough memory. I can at any point save to disk, shut down the
computer, and come back to it at a later time. What happens as a
result of the interruption? Nothing, I say, unless you break the
supervenience thesis, since the program runs exactly the same.
Yes, I said "probably not". I qualified it because the implicit
assumption is that conscious thought is supervening on the computer
processes and so you might wonder about what thoughts occur as
registers are read off onto the disk and later as they are
reloaded. Those things are abstracted away in ideal von Neuman
computers, Turing machines and other mathematical abstractions of
computation.
But aside from that, my original point was that mental states
m1-m2-m3 are instantiated by something like brain "states"
s1-s2-s3-....-s2345-s2346-s2347. And there's no sharp demarcation
between m1 and m2 in terms of the brain states.
Wouldn't that be the same for any complex process that is being simulated?
Except for most complex processes there's no question that the result
can be analyzed and time sliced as well as the computation. But for
consciousness/thoughts/experiences/observer-moments there is this
implicit assumption that they are unanalyzable wholes/unities.
Brent
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