> On 25 Aug 2019, at 11:51, Philip Thrift <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Sunday, August 25, 2019 at 4:17:11 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: > On Sun, Aug 25, 2019 at 12:16 AM Jason Resch <[email protected] > <javascript:>> wrote: > > > The mind is a pattern distinct from any of it's physical incarnations. > Brains have mass, minds do not. > Brains have definite locations, minds do not. > Minds can exist in multiple locations at once, brains cannot. > Minds can travel from one physical universe to another, or to locations > beyond the cosmological horizon receding at speeds greater than c, brains > cannot. > > I agree with all that but there is nothing mystical about it, it's just the > difference between nouns and adjectives. Mind is what a brain does. > > John K Clark > > > > "Mind is what a brain does." > "Nuclear fusion is what a star does." > > Simple as that.
The analogy breaks down at some point. The conception of the Star is 3p (to simplify, eventually with mechanism a Star is only 1p plural). Nuclear fission is 3p. The reduction makes sense. Now, “mind” is ambiguous. Clark defines it by what brain does, but by accepting mechanism, he has to accept that it is what any universal machine does. (If he survived in virtue of a digital emulation, it cannot matter which universal machinery is used to implement it, or he put some magic somewhere, but then he cannot say yes to the doctor which does not take that magic (non Turing emulable thing) into account). But that is OK, because when “mind” is defined in that sense, you can see it in an as much 3p way than the brain, or the machine, or the relative code in arithmetic. Everything is 3p here. Where the analogy break down, is when you try to singularise your first person experience, the 1p, that you live, with the 3p brain. Imagine that two identical brain/computer run the same program. Are you located in one brain/computer or in both? What if one computer run quickly, processed by a high speed machine, and the second one is processed slowly, by a Babbage machine. Would you be able to tell the difference? To predict, not an eclipse, but the 1p experience of seeing an eclipse, correctly, you need to know if some Boltzmann brain will not emulate your exact “here-and-now” state before the eclipse, and that will not help, because you need actually to know about all computations going through your here and now state, and see the proportion of those going through the experience of seeing the eclipse. All computations are executed in arithmetic, which means you need some measure theory, based on the mathematics of digital self-reference (with some random oracle, etc.). The problem of the 1p-mind is that he can do nothing, and still feel something. Mechanism truncated the persons, but that entails that person is more a non material type than a nominalist singular token. We are abstract beings (with mechanism), and we are linked to all our relative representations, and we have an infinity of them. A non-mechanist can try to singularise a mind and the physical machine supporting it, by adding infinities in both, but I am not sure this could work out, as the infinities multiplies even more than the finite, so they will get a super-infinite type of universal dovetailing, on some large cardinals or ordinals, and they will get the same, but more complex, measure problem. It is just an open problem if non-mechanism can provide any help, to be honest. I think it is simplest take the simpler theory, and change it when we find discrepancies with facts, or internal inconsistencies. Bruno > > @philipthrift > > -- > 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 [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/57abca97-361f-4b1e-85c6-14bd8e4837c4%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/57abca97-361f-4b1e-85c6-14bd8e4837c4%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/A96C8DE5-D49C-437A-93EA-519A43B8B232%40ulb.ac.be.
