On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 10:54 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List < everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> On 5/9/2019 5:18 PM, Jason Resch wrote: > > > > That all subjectively indistinguishable computations going through > > that state are a possibility means the consciousness cannot identify > > itself with any one particular thread of computation. In this sense > > that consciousness is not the same as one of the programs passing > > through that state. But to say the consciousness is not identical > > with one of the computations is different from saying that computation > > is not conscious. If none of the threads of computation resulted in > > consciousness, you wouldn't magically get consciousness once you > > reached an infinite number of them. The only thing you gain with the > > infinite number of all the computations going through that state is > > the correct statistics regarding the future evolution of that conscious. > > "The state" seems a problematic concept to me. It tries to roughly > equate a state of consciousness, a thought, with a state of a Turing > machine (plus tape). But saying yes to the doctor implies a much lower > level of substitution than "a thought". Thoughts come from perceptions, > among other things, which are not complete thoughts or "states of > consciousness". So it is not at all clear what it means for > "computations going thru that state" when the state may refer to > thousands of steps of the Turing machine. Is a computation thread that > share 999 of the states "going thru the state"? And to further > complicate this mapping between thoughts and machine states, there > sequence of machine states is the same at the temporal order of thoughts. > I think the level of confusion is even greater than this. In order to develop the YD+CT argument, one must assume the existence of a physical world that is independent of the consciousness one is trying to emulate in a computer. But if this physical world is just statistics over the computations through the conscious state, then altering the physical world (by constructing the computer to replace the brain) must alter the conscious state, since the physical world is not independent of the conscious state in that case. If the YD+CT argument based on the assumption of an independent physical world leads to the conclusion that there is no independent physical world, then you have a reductio ad absurdum, and the argument cannot be valid. Bruce -- 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. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAFxXSLQ_TpBNMOcs_f4Zyq6TiRGBeKkWB%2B6YBzt3Px%2BwjC%2B5vA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
