On 10/09/07, Vladimir Nesov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As a final paradoxical example, if implementation Z is nothing, that > is it comprises no matter and information ar all, there still is a > correspondence function F(Z)=S which supposedly asserts that Z is X's > upload. There can even be a feature extractor (which will have to implement > functional simulation of S) that works on an empty Z. What is the > difference from subjective experience simulation point of view between > this empty Z and a proper upload implementation?
A profound point that anyone who believes in computationalism has to address. The only way I can think of to keep computationalism and remain consistent is to drop the thesis that consciousness supervenes on physical activity. Rather, we can say that consciousness is a Platonic object that supervenes on an abstract machine, with physical activity such as that of brains or computers being simply a realization of an abstract machine, not actually contributing or detracting from the measure of a particular consciousness, since you can't change the measure of an abstract mathematical object by having more or fewer physical examples of it. This would leave no place for a concrete physical world: everything we see is a subset of all possible simulations running on an abstract machine. Certainly, this is weird, but the alternative would seem to be that the mind is not Turing emulable. -- Stathis Papaioannou ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=40103766-61ed4d
