On 23 Apr 2017, at 00:42, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On 23/04/2017 12:52 am, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Apr 22, 2017 at 6:12 AM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 4/21/2017 3:42 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
John is accusing you of naive dualism. He says that you claim that
there is some mysterious substance (he finally called it a "soul")
that is not copied in your thought experiment. What I claim is
this:
under physicalist assumptions, everything was copied. The problem
is
that physicalism leads to a contradiction,
I don't agree that it leads to a contradiction. Can spell out
what that
contradiction is?
Shortly (sorry for any lack of rigour):
If you assume computationalism, the computation that is currently
supporting your mind state can be repeated in time and space. Maybe
your current computation happens in the original planet Earth but
also
in a Universal Dovetailer running on a Jupiter-sized computer in a
far-away galaxy. Given a multiverse, it seems reasonable to assume
that these repetitions are bound to happen (also with the simulation
argument, etc.). And yet our mind states are experienced as unique.
It
follows that, given computationalism, mind cannot be spatially or
temporally situated, thus cannot be physical.
This does not demonstrate any contradiction with physicalism. In
fact, you examples are all completely consistent with the
requirement that any computation requires a physical substrate -- "a
Universal Dovetailer running on a Jupiter-sized computer in a far-
away galaxy" is a completely physical concept.
Even given computationalism -- the idea that you consciousness is a
computation
Consciousness is an 1p notion
Computation is a 3p notion.
So with computationalism, consciousness IS NOT a computation.
It is a state of self-referential knowledge that can be enacted
through a computation.
-- there is no contradiction with physicalism. You have to add
something else -- namely, hard mathematical platonism,
You need only to assume that classical logic applies to a tiny part of
arithmetic. Precisely, you need to believe/assume that for all i, j,
P_i(j) is stops or does not stop, with the P_i(j) denoting the ith
program in some enumeration of all programs applied on j.
the idea that all computations exist in the abstract, in platonia,
and do not require physical implementation.
That is a theorem. The only assumption you need is Church's thesis,
predicate calculus, and:
((K x) y) = x
(((S x) y) z) = ((x z) (y z))
or if you prefer, the more familiar:
0 ≠ (x + 1)
((x + 1) = (y + 1)) -> x = y
x = 0 v Ey(x = y + 1)
x + 0 = x
x + (y + 1) = (x + y) + 1
x * 0 = 0
x * (y + 1) = (x * y) + x
But that is merely the assumption that physicalism is false.
?
So it may be the case that mathematical platonism does not require a
physical universe, but it does not contradict physicalism: it is
perfectly possible that your consciousness is a computation, and
that mathematical platonism is true, but that there is still a
primitive physical universe and that any actual computations require
a physical substrate -- as JC keeps insisting.
No contradiction has been demonstrated.
You have to explain how your Matter select the computations on which
you are conscious. Computationalism explains instead why there is an
illusion of matter and why it remains stable.
Bruno
Bruce
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