Re: Hofstadter Quiz question

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue Jul 20 09:10:18 1999

Tomoyuki Tanaka (through Chris Maloney) suggest for
the holiday exercice (find a methodological contradiction between
Hofstadter and himself in Mind's I):

>
>P = "the fundamental uncertainty in quantum physics is unrelated
> to the mystery of mind".

Bravo. A little more precise sentence is (with "not P")

not P = "the fundamental indeterminism in quantum physics could be
a consequence of the computationalist hypothesis in philosophy of mind".

The curious thing is that Hofstadter criticizes Everett MWI by saying
it would not explain why we feel that we are in this branche and not
in another one (well known critics btw).
But in the conversation with Einstein's brain, although he duplicates
Einstein's brain, he does not realize that Einstein could have asked
the very same question "why am I the one speaking with Achille and
not the one speaking with the Tortoise".
So if the absence of answer to the question "why we feel that we
are in this branche ..." is a critics of MWI, it should be use as
a critics of the computationalist hypothese too.

This shows that neither Dennett nor Hofstadter seems to have seen the
computationalist indeterminism.
And of course they have not seen that comp implies a MWI of arithmetics.

I agree that this "indeterminism" is first person indeterminism. This
first
person indeterminism can nevertheless easily be changed into a third
person
indeterminism by duplicating populations of machines.

Bruno
Received on Tue Jul 20 1999 - 09:10:18 PDT