Le 09-mai-05, à 00:13, Lee Corbin wrote (FOR list)
Bruno writes
Le 07-mai-05, à 09:33, Bill Taylor a écrit :
COMP has three parts:
...
3) The assumption, in cognitive science, that there is
a level of description of my parts (whatever I
consider myself to be) such that I would not be
aware of any experiential change if a functionally
correct digital substitution is done of my parts
at that level.
<<<
but that (3) is highly dubious, being a pious hope
rather than anything supported by evidence.
I could agree with you. My point is that it is non trivial,
due to incompleteness, and that it is amenable to experimental
and mathematical scrutiny.
Your aim has been, and for all I know you have succeeded, in
placing this beyond the reach of philosophy (in a certain sense)
and trying to place it all on a firm mathematical foundation.
Good luck.
Thanks. That's an important point. My original goal was just to show to
scientist that the so-called "Mind-Body problem" is just not yet
solved, and that it is amenable to verifiable Popperian scientist
formulation.
But as a merely philosophic claim, it has, like I was saying,
an old pedigree.
Absolutely. I have found prechristian indian text reasoning quite
rigorously on "comp". It's also in Chineese taoist text (Tchoang Tseu,
Lie Tseu). It is as old as tools ...
By the way, Bill does not seem to have stated so explicitly,
but isn't it also a part of your claim---a vital part---that
we're just bit strings in Platonia, nothing more,
That is a slightly misleading way to put the things. Obviously I am not
a string of bit (with I = "my first person view")
nor am I a collection of interacting particle ... All that are third
person view (the first in platonia, the second in physics ...). As I
said, the 1 person is not reductible to any 3-person view. But with the
comp hyp made explicit, by some "meta-reasoning" it is possible to
associate a quite explicit logic on machine explaining the existence of
those things which have no 3-person description (but yet
"meta-describable" through the comp hyp). This is related to subtle
feature of machine self-reference.
nothing
less, and that our good old 3D universe operating through
time really reduces to Platonia, and to bit strings without
*activity* (the latter depending for its meaning on *time*)?
That latter point is all that I have a problem with, the
above claims 1, 2, and 3 all seeming unexceptional.
The utimate 3-view is indeed probably static (but once things are
technical you will see that there are many open problems). We will come
back on this.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
