On 08 Oct 2015, at 18:31, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 2:14 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
> QM says that the brains will very quickly (microseconds)
diverge.
You pulled that microsecond figure straight out of the air. Nobody
knows exactly how long it would take for quantum indeterminacy to
make 2 brains diverge significantly more than, for example, taking a
sip of coffee; but I would bet money it would take many millions (if
not billions) of microseconds.
It takes about the time for light to travel. I think it is quicker
than millions of microseconds.
Bruno
John K Clark
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 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. Of
course duplication of brains or people is not possible - but
duplication of computers is. 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.
Brent
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