On 4/22/2019 6:32 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Mon, Apr 22, 2019 at 7:51 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 4/22/2019 4:24 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 3:16 AM Bruno Marchal <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 5 Nov 2018, at 02:56, Martin Abramson
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Consciousness is a program.
Consciousness might be related to a program, but is not a
program, that would identify a first person notion with a
third person notion, like a glass of bear and its price.
It explores whatever entity it finds itself within and
becomes that creature's awareness of the world. For humans
it becomes the identity or soul which responds to anything
that affects the organism. It can be uploaded into a data
bank but otherwise it dissipates with death.
How? We can attach a soul to a machine, but a machine cannot
attach its soul to any particular computations, only to the
infinity of (relative) computations, and there is at least
aleph_zero one, of not a continuum.
Bruno
The above reminded me of this quote from Alan Turing:
Personally I think that spirit is really eternally connected with
matter but certainly not always by the same kind of body. I did
believe it possible for a spirit at death to go to a universe
entirely separate from our own, but now I consider that matter
and spirit are so connected that this would be a contradiction in
terms. It is possible however but unlikely that such universes
may exist.
Then as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I
consider that the body by reason of being a living body can
``attract´´ and hold on to a ``spirit,´´ whilst the body is alive
and awake the two are firmly connected. When the body is asleep I
cannot guess what happens but when the body dies the
``mechanism´´ of the body, holding the spirit is gone and the
spirit finds a new body sooner or later perhaps immediately.
It seems otiose to postulate a separate spirit. A pitiful attempt
to grasp immortality. Isn't it plain that what is "immaterial"
and distinguishes a brain of a rock is that the brain instantiates
processes which incorporate memory, purpose, perception, and action.
Is it otiose to make a distinction between a "story" and a "book", or
a "program" and a "computer", or might there be value in that nuance?
Clearly a program stops executing locally when a computer executing
that program is destroyed, but of course this says nothing about the
destruction, existence, non-existence, continuation, quantity, or
locations of other instances of that program.
It does if that program was unique, as any program capable of learning
is likely to be.
I think here Turing was making a similar point, in the nuanced
distinction between a mind and a brain.
I quite agree with the distinction between mind and brain. But why
should we imagine it is different from the distinction between a
locomotive and transportation, between a ship and a voyage, between a
factory and manufacturing?
Brent
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