On 29/04/2017 1:18 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 27 Apr 2017, at 23:22, Brent Meeker wrote:
The absurdity, if I've understood this, is that idea of physical
substitution leads to a conclusion that nothing physical is needed.
The absurdity is that the first person experience in physics has to be
a sum on all computations (to be short).
This might cause some problems for the SAN04 argument. The "Yes, doctor"
assumption says that if my brain is replaced by a functionally correct
digital device (at the appropriate substitution level), then I would not
be aware of any experiential change. But if my first person experience
is the sum on all computations that pass through my conscious state,
then no digital computer could ever be a "sum on an infinity of
computations", so my conscious state could not be reproduced in this
way. In fact, as has been said, the sum on all computations is not
Turing emulable. Thus my conscious state is not Turing emulable, and the
"Yes, doctor" scenario fails -- we would have to say "No" to the doctor.
The second problem with the idea that the first person experience has to
be the sum on all computations, is that this renders duplication of
persons impossible. If you duplicate the computation(s) that make up a
first person experience, you have simply added some more computations to
that experience and the sum over *all* computations is unchanged. Thus
there is still only one first person experience, and the attempted
duplication fails.
So, if the "Yes, doctor" assumption, and the subsequent duplication
scenarios, lead to the conclusion that the first person experience is a
sum on all computations, the argument is self-contradictory: the
conclusion contradicts the input assumptions and the argument is incoherent.
Bruce
So even if a physical universe exists, it *cannot* have any influence
on my prediction. Physics lose *all* its prediction power.
Computationalism saves physics, we should say, but makes it more
modest when wandering on metaphysics.
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