Re: computationalism and supervenience

From: Russell Standish <r.standish.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 04:28:53 +1000

On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 01:32:14PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> Bruno Marchal writes:
>
> > > The other sticking point is, given computationalism
> > > is right, what does it take to implement a computation? There have
> > > been arguments
> > > that a computation is implemented by any physical system (Putnam,
> > > Searle, Moravec)
> > > and by no physical system (Maudlin, Bruno Marchal).
> >
> >
> >
> > OK. To be sure Maudlin would only partially agree. Maudlin shows (like
> > me) that we have:
> >
> > NOT COMP or NOT PHYSICAL SUPERVENIENCE
>
> That sentence summarises the problem pretty well. We have to agree that there is this dichotomy before proceeding further, and I don't think most computationalists do.
>

To be sure, this is not how I interpret Maudlin or the movie-graph
argument. I interpret it as NOT COMP or NOT PHYS SUP or NOT SINGLE_UNIVERSE.

In a multiple universe (eg Everett style MWI), all counterfactuals are
instantiated as well, so physical supervenience (over all branches) is
compatible to COMP, and not equivalent to a recording.

Cheers

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Received on Tue Aug 22 2006 - 00:03:04 PDT