On 28 Oct 2015, at 10:14, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 28 Oct 2015, at 9:28 AM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
On 10/27/2015 3:04 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 28 Oct 2015, at 1:30 AM, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 5:16 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]
> wrote:
>> From examples in the physical world. You can give as
many botanical definitions of the word "tree" as you want but it
will just be a word defined by other words that are themselves
defined by yet more words that are.... If you tried to dig for
meaning all you'd find is a endless loop, it would just be a game
where words are manipulated according to the rules of botany
until somebody forgot about definitions and pointed to the
ASCII string "t-r-e-e" and then pointed to a large
photosynthesizing organism made largely of cellulose that exists
in the physical world. Then even a martian would notice a
correspondence between this game of manipulating symbols called
"botany" that humans had invented and the way these large
photosynthesizing organism made largely of cellulose live.
> What about a virtual world with trees and observers, and
no I/O devices connecting it to outside trees?
There would still be I/O devices connected to the virtual
trees made by a computer that operated according to the laws of
physics, if not the trees wouldn't even be virtual. And the
books on both virtual botany and real botany would still be more
than a just a symbol manipulation game, they would have semantic
content because there would be a correspondence
between the way the symbols are manipulated and the way
the virtual (or real) large photosynthesizing organism live.
Regardless of if they are virtual or real if you want to know
how trees live studying those botany symbols in virtual (or real)
books will help, so they must have semantic content .
The requirement that a computation be able to interact with the
real world puts a restriction on what qualifies as a computation.
You've challenged Bruno many times to perform a difficult
computation using his Platonic computer. Well, that computation is
occurring in front of you now in the thermal motion of the atoms
in your desk, which under an appropriate interpretation are
implementing a Turing machine. But you and Bruno don't have that
appropriate interpretation, and if you did, you would have the
result of the calculation already. In other words, the thermal
motion computation is not understandable as such in, and cannot
interact with, the world at the level of the substrate of its
implementation; so it would usually be said that either there is
no computation being implemented, or it is being implemented only
in a trivial and useless sense. But remove the requirement for
interaction in the real world, and this objection falls down. The
computation is being implemented, your difficult calculation has
been completed, and it is being appreciated by the virtual
observers who are clapping and cheering - even though you can't
hear them.
That's essentially Bruno's MGA, except it stops one step short.
Bruno takes the last step and says even if the atoms of your desk
were doing absolutely nothing there is an interpretation in which
that is a computation; hence the atoms are superfluous. But
clearly then it is the interpretation which is providing the
computation.
I agree; if anything at all can be seen as a computation,
But anything at all cannot be seen as a computation. A computation ïs*
the doing of some universal numbers. For all bases, most things will
not be computation. They are very specific object/relation in
arithmetic. They are determined by a universal number, and the data,
having decided on some base to describe them.
it is not the thing that matters, but the interpretation.
Usually done by some universal number (in arithmetic, for example).
There are two ways to avoid this conclusion. One is to say that
consciousness is not computable. The other is to say that a
computation can only be implemented relative to the real world.
The first negate computationalism, and the second use a god-of-the-gap
(real world) to use a never defined notion (physical implementation of
a computation) and this to hide a problem instead of trying to solve it.
Bruno
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