Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> Le 22-août-06, à 15:26, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
>
>
>>OK, I suppose you could say "I'm intelligent" but not "I + my
>>environment are intelligent".
>>That still allows that an inputless program might contain intelligent
>>beings, and you are left
>>with the problem of how to decide whether a physical system is
>>implementing such a program
>>given that you can't talk to it.
>
>
>
> People who believes that inputs (being either absolute-material or
> relative-platonical) are needed for consciousness should not believe
> that we can be conscious in a dream, given the evidence that the brain
> is almost completely cut out from the environment during rem sleep.
Almost is not completely. In any case, I don't think consciousness is maintained
indefinitely with no inputs. I think a "brain-in-a-vat" would go into an endless
loop without external stimulus.
>I
> guess they have no problem with comatose people either.
Comatose people are generally referred to as "unconscious".
> Of course they cannot be even just troubled by the UD, which is a
> program without inputs and without outputs.
As I understood the UD the program itself was not conscious, but rather that some
parts are supposed to be, relative to a simulated environment.
>
> Now, without digging in the movie-graph, I would still be interested if
> someone accepting "standard comp" (Peter's expression) could explain
> how a digital machine could correctly decide that her environment is
> "real-physical".
"Decide" is ambiguous. She could very well form that hypothesis and find much
confirming and no contrary evidence. What are you asking for? a proof from some
axioms? Which axioms?
>If such machine and reasoning exist, it will be done
> in Platonia, and, worst, assuming comp, it will be done as correctly as
> the real machine argument. This would lead to the fact that in
> Platonia, there are (many) immaterial machines proving *correctly* that
> they are immaterial. Contradiction.
Suppose a physical machine implements computation and proves relative to some axioms
that physical machines don't exist. Contradiction?
Brent Meeker
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Received on Tue Aug 22 2006 - 22:00:16 PDT