> On 1 May 2019, at 18:39, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> <everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 5/1/2019 2:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> My point is that "qualia" don't exist independent of an environment, and an 
>>> evolutionary history.
>> 
>> That is ambiguous. A human qualia needs a human history.
> 
> Human qualia are the only kind we know.  Other qualia, independent of 
> environment and evolutionary history, would be "to speculate on something 
> that we have no evidence for”.

I have few doubts that all mammals, and some invertebrates have qualia. I doubt 
that if there were alien, they would not have qualia, and if you agree with the 
(meta—definition I gave of consciousness, then it is a theorem that all 
universal machine have qualia. But for such qualia to be comparable to pours, 
they need some histories comparable to ours. 



> 
>> But with mechanism, a human qualia can be encoded into a program or a 
>> number, and copied.
> 
> That's the assumption of Mechanism. 

Yes.


> But it is not clear to me how the semantics that allow the encoded qualia to 
> refer to the environment are preserved.

If they are not, you will get p-zombies, or the guy with the artificial brain 
will just “not work”, perhaps looking dead, or something. By definition of 
Mechanism, there is such a level, and they like Darwinism, to function needs 
such a level, as Darwin mentioned rather explicitly (and from which he 
correctly predicts the existence of digital encoding, which has been verified 
by Molecular biologist (cf A, T, G, C).





> 
>> 
>> It is true for other “deep notion”. The work of Shakespeare needs also a 
>> human long history, but you can copy the entire work of Shakespeare on a 
>> disk.
> 
> But it can only be decoded into "The work of Shakespeare" in our environment 
> (or every similar).

Yes, but with mechanism, we can always truncate the information at some digital 
level.

I don’t claim mechanism is true, I just derive the metaphysical/theological 
conclusion, including the necessary laws of physics. It fits with the facts, 
including consciousness, where physicalism has to invoke some dubious (and 
inconsistent with mechanism) ontological commitment.



> 
>> 
>> If your point is that you would only say “yes” to the doctor, if he copies 
>> your brain+a part of the environment, you are still in the frame of the 
>> mechanist assumption, unless you explicit posit something both not coinable 
>> in the environment and relevant for your conscious state to survive the 
>> copy, but in that case, we are out of my working hypothesis (at a place 
>> where I will ask why to speculate on something that we have no evidence for).
> 
> But we do have evidence for it.  Nature is quantum mechanical and that puts 
> limits on what is "coinable in the environment”.

I guess you meant “clonable”; On the contrary, with mechanism matter is not 
clonable for all its aspect belonging below our substitution level, which has 
to exists (due to the infinity of computations going through or relevant finite 
state), so that the non cloning theorem confirms mechanism. 

Bruno



> 
> Brent
> 
>> (Would Z1* depart from Nature, that would be such an evidence, but that has 
>> not yet been shown.)
>> 
>> Bruno
> 
> 
> -- 
> 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.

-- 
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.

Reply via email to