Re: R/ASSA query
On 04 Mar 2010, at 06:44, Rex Allen wrote: On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I may be absent for a period, for reason of sciatica. Best, Bruno No worries! I will be a bit delayed on my response anyway. All is well! I am back home ...because they have not enough room in the hospital. I am under the effect of a ton of legal drugs (offensive, addictive, expensive, etc.., but rather cool I have to say). I made impressive dreams this night. I have to go back and forth from home to hospital, for doing exams. Which is not easy, because I cannot move my left leg. Crazy modern world. One day the dead will have to dig their own hole! But it is OK, and it makes me possible to comment the mails, from time to time. Anyway, take all your time, Rex, there is no rush. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: problem of size '10
On 04 Mar 2010, at 22:59, Jack Mallah wrote: Bruno, I hope you feel better. Thanks. My quarrel with you is nothing personal. Why would I think so? Now I am warned. --- Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Jack Mallah wrote: Bruno, you don't have to assume any 'prescience'; you just have to assume that counterfactuals count. No one but you considers that 'prescience' or any kind of problem. This would lead to fading qualia in the case of progressive substitution from the Boolean Graph to the movie graph. I thought you said you don't use the 'fading qualia' argument (see below), which in any case is invalid as my partial brain paper shows. So, you are wrong. It is a different fading qualia argument, older and different from Chlamers. It is explained in my PhD thesis, and earlier article, bur also in MGA3 on this list, and in a paper not yet submitted. Do you agree with the definition I give of the first person and third person in teleportation arguments? I mean I have no clue what you are missing. You confuse MGA and Maudlin's argument. If consciousness supervenes on the physical realization of a computation, including the inactive part, it means you attach consciousness on an unknown physical phenomenon. It is a magical move which blurs the difficulty. Eithr the physical counterfactualness is Turing emulable, or not. If it is, we can emulate it at a some level, and you will have to make consciousness supervene on something not Turing emulable to keep the physical supervenience. gradually replace the components of the computer (which have the standard counterfactual (if-then) functioning) with components that only play out a pre-recorded script or which behave correctly by luck. You could then invoke the 'fading qualia' argument (qualia could plausibly not vanish either suddenly or by gradually fading as the replacement proceeds) to argue that this makes no difference to the consciousness. My partial brain paper shows that the 'fading qualia' argument is invalid. I am not using the 'fading qualia' argument. Then someone else on the list must have brought it up at some point. In any case, it was the only interesting argument in favor of your position, which was not trivially obviously invalid. My PB paper shows that it is invalid though. ? What do you mean by ?? You may cite the paper then, and say where things go wrong. I provide a deductive argument. It is a proof, if you prefer. It is not easy, but most who take the time to study it have not so much problem with the seven first steps, and eventually ask precise questions for the 8th one, which needs some understanding of what is a computation, in the mathematical sense of the terms. The key consists in understanding the difference that exists, even in platonia, between a 'genuine computation, and a mere description of a computation. I guess by 'physical supervenience' you mean supervenience on physical activity only. Not at all. In the comp theory, it means supervenience on the physical realization of a computation. So, it includes supervenience on the counterfactuals? But physical is taken in the agnostic sense. It is whatever is (Turing) universal and stable enough in my neighborhood so that I can bet my immaterial self and its immaterial (mathematica) computation or processing will go through a functional substitution. Eventually, that physical realization is shown to be a sum on an infinity of computation realized in elementary arithmetic. If so, the movie obviously doesn't have the right counterfactuals, Of course. Glad you agree that the movie has no private experience. Most who want to block the UD argument pretend that the movie is conscious (but this leads to other absurdities). so your MGA fails. On the contrary, that was the point. It was a reductio ad absurdo. If consciousness supervenes, in real time and place to a physical activity realizing a computation, and this qua computatio then consciousness supervenes on the movie (MGA2). But this is indeed absurd, and so consciousness does not supervene on the physical activity realizing the computation, but on the computation itself (and then on all computations by first person indeterminacy). This solves also Maudlin's difficulty, given that Maudlin find weird that consciousness supervenience needs the presence of physically inactive entities. I see nothing nontrivial in your arguments. Nice! You agree with the argument then. Or what? Computationalism assumes supervenience on both physical activity and physical laws (aka counterfactuals). ? You evacuate the computation? I have no idea what you mean by that. Computations are implemented based on both activity and counterfactuals, which is the same as saying they supervene on both. Then you have to provide a physical definition of what are
Re: problem of size '10
On Mar 5, 8:43 am, Jack Mallah jackmal...@yahoo.com wrote: and in any case is a thought experiment. The term seems particularly appropriate in this case! Charles -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: problem of size '10
--- On Wed, 3/3/10, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not sure if you overlooked it but the key condition in my paper is that the inputs to the remaining brain are identical to what they would have been if the whole brain were present. Thus, the neural activity in the partial brain is by definition identical to what would have occured in the corresponding part of a whole brain. It is of course grossly implausible that this could be done in practice for a real biological brain (for one thing, you'd pretty much have to know in advance the microscopic details of everything that would have gone on in the removed part of the brain, or else guess and get incredibly lucky), but it presents no difficulties in priciple for a digital simulation, The only fundamental difficulty I can see with this is if the brain actually uses quantum computation, as suggested by some evidence that photopsynthesis does (quoted by Bruno in another thread) - in which case it might be impossible, even in principle, to reproduce the activity of the rest of the brain (I'm not sure whether it would, but it seems a lot more likely). Charles -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: problem of size '10
On 3/5/2010 11:58 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: In this list I have already well explained the seven step of UDA, and one difficulty remains in the step 8, which is the difference between a computation and a description of computation. Due to the static character of Platonia, some believes it is the same thing, but it is not, and this is hard to explain. That hardness is reflected in the AUDA: the 'translation' of UDA in arithmetic. The subtlety is that again, the existence of a computation is true if and only if the existence of a description of the computation exist, but that is true at the level G*, and not at the G level, so that such an equivalence is not directly available, and it does not allow to confuse a computation (a mathematical relation among numbers), and a description of a computation (a number). This mixing of existence and true in the context of a logic confuses me. I understand you take a Platonic view of arithmetic so that all propositions of arithmetic are either true or false, even though most of them are not provable (from any given finite axioms), so true=/=provable. But what does it mean to say a computation is true at one level and not another? Does it mean provable? or it there is some other meaning of true relative to a logic? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: problem of size '10
On 3/5/2010 1:29 PM, Charles wrote: --- On Wed, 3/3/10, Stathis Papaioannoustath...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not sure if you overlooked it but the key condition in my paper is that the inputs to the remaining brain are identical to what they would have been if the whole brain were present. Thus, the neural activity in the partial brain is by definition identical to what would have occured in the corresponding part of a whole brain. It is of course grossly implausible that this could be done in practice for a real biological brain (for one thing, you'd pretty much have to know in advance the microscopic details of everything that would have gone on in the removed part of the brain, or else guess and get incredibly lucky), but it presents no difficulties in priciple for a digital simulation, The only fundamental difficulty I can see with this is if the brain actually uses quantum computation, as suggested by some evidence that photopsynthesis does (quoted by Bruno in another thread) - in which case it might be impossible, even in principle, to reproduce the activity of the rest of the brain (I'm not sure whether it would, but it seems a lot more likely). Charles That would keep you from cloning the state of the brain, but it should still be possible to reproduce the functionality. So it be like replacing part of your brain with that same part from some other time; you'd lose memories, or have them scrambled, but it wouldn't affect whether or not you had qualia. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
