Re:implementation

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue Jul 20 09:23:24 1999

Jacques M Mallah wrote:

>From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
>>Jacques M Mallah did indeed accept that consciousness will rely on the
>>presence or absence of inactive piece, but this will put arbitrariness
>>in any notion of physical instantiation of a computation, in the very
>>opposite direction of what Turing-mechanism, or computationalisme is.
>
> No. First of all I never said that it depends on an inactive
>piece; I just said that inactivity does not disqualify that piece.

I don't understand. Do you believe or not that consciousness
is maintained in a well-implemented computation running on a UTM, where
all inactive registers (we know them because we have run that computation
before) have been eliminated ? Yes or No.
I guess you mean NO, if only because you tell us "inactivity does not
disqualify that piece". But this means that the presence of
consciousness
during an execution of a computation depends on the presence of an
inactive
piece, i.e. inactive during that computation.

>As
>pointed out above the piece would likely not be inactive since it would
>have to perform the computation to verify the run.

I believe you try to say something here. I don't see exactly what you
are talking about. What do you mean by "verify the run" ?

> As for "arbritrariness", I don't know what you're smoking but I
>*don't* see that happenning *AT ALL* in this example. You have said
>nothing to even *try* to justify such a statement.

That is *ALL* what the crackpot/maudlin's argument is about.
Why do you think Hal concludes :

<<if
 a factory fire in India can affect whether a system
 here and now is conscious, you are moving into a realm
 where intuitions
 about consciousness become highly suspect.">>

Note that the argument shows also that any computation can be
executed in a
counterfactual correct way with an arbitrary small amount of
arbitrary physical activities.

When you say:

<<The
computationalist has decided what seems important, such as the
counterfactual stucture, and has no problem believing that unless the
copper wires support a different counterfactual structure they would
implement the same computation.>>

I agree so much with you !
but if you belief
1) than consciousness is invariant for functional substitution which
preserves the counterfactual structure ;
2) than consciousness supervenes on the physical activity implementing
the computation, then you are in trouble because consciousness can be
made
to supervene on some spurious physical activities.


The problem is that the "Physical Activity" of ONE execution of a
(classical) computation has been showned here to be independant
of the counterfactual structure which relies abstractly to all
possible executions. Here comp happens again deeply linked to the
everythings idea.
You must read more closely Maudlin or Hal's comments.

I guess I was overoptimist last day: you have not yet seen the point.
As Maudlin explicitely tells us "his" argument is one level of abstraction
deeper that Ned Block-Searle (and Mallah-Chalmers-Putnam, btw) type(s)
of 'false implementation' argument.

More on this when I will be less buzy.

Bruno.
Received on Tue Jul 20 1999 - 09:23:24 PDT