From: *Jason Resch* <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 12:26 AM Bruce Kellett <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:From: *Jason Resch* <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>To clarify, let me enumerate stages of the argument such that we can be clear which one we are speaking of: 1. Your brain can be replaced with a functionally equivalent physical component which implements its functions digitally (here we change nothing about our assumption of what the physical universe is) 2. Following from #1, your consciousness can supervene on an appropriately programmed digital computerThat implies that my consciousness is just a single computation, potentially implemented on a linear Turing machine.That I said supervene implies that a many-to-one relationship between computations and mental states. This is no different from any other functionalist or even physicalist theories of mind. That there are neutrinos going through your brain means there are different physical states, but these neutrinos (supposedly) don't alter your conscious state. Therefore, that many different different patterns of neutrinos in your brain result in the same mental/conscious state suggests a many-to-one relationship between physical states and mental states.
The important point here is that only one pattern of neutrinos exists in my brain at any one time. It is not the case that I am a superposition of several different patterns. Think of it this way: You can describe the action of the brain in consciousness at several different levels: The functional level (this brain is conscious); the neuronal level (these particular neurons are firing); the chemical level (these particular neurotransmitters are flowing here and there); the molecular level (these neurons and neurotransmitters are made up of such and such molecules interacting in these ways); or the level of atoms, quarks, electromagnetic fields, etc, which make up the molecules. All of these levels of description are possible, but the all describe the same single brain in action. There are not separate simultaneous consciousnesses according to each level of description - each underlying program if you like. Consciousness is a unitary thing, it is not made up of the sum over, or statistics of, many different computational streams. There may be different level of description, but there is only one consciousness for each physical brain.
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