On Tue, Aug 02, 2016 at 06:55:58PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 02 Aug 2016, at 14:40, Bruce Kellett wrote: > > >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. > > > > Computationalism refutes that claim immediately. Take the WM- > duplication experience, maybe the virtual case to make the > reconstitution box as much numerically identical than the copies of > the body (at the relevant digital level). Or just suppose the atom > in the reconstitution box does not distinguish the first person > experiences. In such a case, after the guy pushed on the button in > Helsinki, he will find itself with once consciousness, emulated in > two places at once. So one consciousness inhabits two physical > separated brains, and as I explained you in my preceding posts, the > understanding of this is part of the understanding of the FPI (step > 3) and the sequel. Eventually, one consciousness is emulated in > infinitely many different numerical relations in arithmetic, and the > bodies appearances will emerge from that. > > You asked me something impossible, contradicting comp immediately, > and which would be a problem for the sequel of the reasoning. It is > a bit weird. >
Hi Bruce, I'm not satisfied with Bruno's answer here, so let me try my perspective. Computational supervenience states that two counterfactually equivalent computations must instantiate the same conscious state. Obviously it is possible for two inequivalent computations to instantiate the same state, even computations passing through different sets of states, which is clearly the case in step 3. However, we are being asked to consider two conscious states where the conscious state differs by at least one bit - the W/M bit. Clearly, by the YD assumption, both states are survivor states from the original conscious state, but are not the same consciousness because of the single bit difference. >From this construction, FPI follows. It doesn't depend on the notion of personal identity, interesting though that discussion is. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
