On 2/08/2016 3:07 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 01 Aug 2016, at 09:04, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Consider ordinary consequences of introspection: I can be conscious
of several unrelated things at once. I can be driving my car,
conscious of the road and traffic conditions (and responding to them
appropriately), while at the same time carrying on an intelligent
conversation with my wife, thinking about what I will make for
dinner, and, in the back of my mind thinking about a philosophical
email exchange. These, and many other things, can be present to my
conscious mind at the same time. I can bring any one of these things
to the forefront of my mind at will, but processing of the separate
streams goes on all the time.
Given this, it is quite easy to imagine that a subset of these
simultaneous streams of consciousness might be associated with myself
in a different body -- in a different place at a different time. I
would be aware of things happening to the other body in real time in
my own consciousness -- because they would, in fact, be happening to me.
If you dissociate consciousness from an actual single brain, then
these things are quite conceivable.
Dissociating consciousness from any actual single brain is what UDA
explains in detail. Then the math shows that this dissociation run
even deeper, as your 1p consciousness is associated with the
infinitely many relative and faithful (at the correct substitution
level or below) state in the (sigma_1) arithmetical relations.
Duplication experiments would then be a real test of the hypothesis
that consciousness could be separated from the physical brain. If the
duplicates are essentially separate conscious beings, unaware of the
thoughts and happenings of the other, then consciousness is tied to a
particular physical brain (or brain substitute).
Not at all, but it might look like that at that stage, but what you
say does not follow from computationalism. The same consciousness
present at both place before the door is open *only* differentiated
when they get the different bit of information W or M.
However, if consciousness is actually an abstract computation that is
tied to a physical brain only in a statistical sense, then we should
expect that the single consciousness could inhabit several bodies
simultaneously.
It is irrelevant to decide how many consciousness or first person
there is. We need only to listen to those which have differentiated to
extract the statistics.
The point that I am trying to make here is that a person's consciousness
at any moment can consist of many independent threads. From this I
speculate that some of these separate threads could actually be
associated with separate physical bodies. In other words, it is
conceivable that a duplication experiment would not result in two
separate consciousnesses, but a single consciousness in separate bodies.
If this is so, the fact that the separate bodies receive different
inputs does not necessarily mean that they differentiate into separate
conscious beings, any more than the fact that I receive different inputs
from moment to moment means that I dissociate into multiple consciousnesses.
It seems that the only reason that one might expect that the different
inputs experienced by the separate duplicates would lead to a
differentiation of the consciousnesses -- i.e., two separate and
distinct conscious beings -- is that one is implicitly making the
physicalist assumption that a single consciousness is necessarily
associated with a single body, such that separate physical bodies
necessarily have separate consciousnesses.
I suggest that for step 3 to go through, you need to demonstrate that
computationalism requires that a single consciousness cannot inhabit two
or more separate physical bodies: without such a demonstration you
cannot conclude that W&M is not a possible outcome that the duplicated
person could experience. You must demonstrate that different inputs lead
to a differentiation of the consciousnesses in the duplication case,
while not so differentiating the consciousness of a single person. The
required demonstration must be based on the assumptions of
computationalism alone, you cannot rely on physics that is not yet in
evidence.
In other words, start from your basic assumptions:
(1) The "yes doctor" hypothesis;
(2) The Church-Turing thesis; and
(3) Arithmetical realism;
and demonstrate that consciousness is limited to a single physical
brain. Not that consciousness can be associated with a physical brain;
but that the one consciousness cannot inhabit two identical, but
physically separated brains.
Bruce
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