On 29 May 2017 6:36 a.m., "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]> wrote:
On 5/28/2017 11:13 AM, David Nyman wrote: I recently posted a comment in reply to Russell on the topic of supervenience, but it may have got lost in the recent posting confusion. Anyway, I append it again below, slightly amended for comprehension in isolation. The comments bear on physical supervenience and on whether consciousness could be said to supervene on UD*. 1) Any coherent notion that particular states of consciousness supervene uniquely on a specific physical object *qua computatio* is effectively poisoned by ambiguity with respect to how that object can variously be parsed as implementing computation. Nevertheless one could still say, in the case of a suitable observable such as a brain, that consciousness supervened, in the straightforward sense of covariance, on its observed physical transitions. In this case there would be no necessary further entailment to those transitions instantiating a computation. Indeed this is in effect a direct implication of the comp theory itself. The claim is that conscious states "in fact" supervene on computation, in the sense both of covariance and fundamental explanatory relation. But at the same time those states *must appear* to supervene, in a brutely covariant but no longer strictly computational sense, on observed physical transitions. So it would seem then that the implicit "theory-of-mind of observable physics" will always appear in the form of an identity relation realised in terms of physical action. In this sense the two theories (or more properly a duality of the same general theory) are not strictly incompatible, but they rely on two different explanatory relationships, which in fine must be commensurable for the comp theory to be viable. I think you have made a long-winded argument for my point that a computation instantiating thought cannot be considered separate from the environment in which the thought is related to perception or action. Brent, although I am beginning to despair of getting this message through to you, I repeat that you are replying to my private email address instead of to the list. Anyway, your point above has never been in dispute AFAICT. I'm glad you consider my remarks an argument in its favour. Sorry if it appears long-winded, but I find that avoiding ambiguity sometimes requires a certain amount of explicitness even if that results in a little tedium for those who feel they already understand the matter. I suppose the burden of the argument is that the notion of supervenience is a little more ambiguous than it appears at first blush, but that finally this ambiguity can be made explicit and reconciled within a more general notion of explanation. 2) Whether or not consciousness supervenes on the dovetailer I think bears on a separate ambiguity. Of course particular conscious states cannot be understood as supervening on the dovetailer's trace as a whole because it is by definition unchanging. Consequently there is no possibility here of covariance. ISTM then that the interpretative ambiguity is that a principle for 'singling out' particular programs and their associated conscious states has not been made explicit. When first one then another particular set of such correlations is successively 'selected' from the trace as a whole then we can indeed intuit a covariance. When the implicit selection changes, What "implicit selection"? The selection that would be implied if this theory was true? Isn't that the same selection that is "implicit" in the stone that calculates everything? Yes. That's why we need to include an effective relation with a shared environment to differentiate the relevant 'selection' from a common 'outside'. As you rightly say. But IMO the notion of selection is essentially undefined in eternalist theories. I think Hoyle agreed. David Brent there is deemed to be a corresponding change in the 'states' of both consciousness and computation. In Bruno's work IIUC the initial selection is simply that we start from a particular state in which we are interested and progress by computational relations to the various continuations. One of the reasons I like Hoyle's heuristic as a pedagogical device is that it makes a serialisation of such 'selections' explicit and it may consequently be easier to intuit what is supposed to be changing. 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