Re: computationalism and supervenience

From: Russell Standish <r.standish.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 22:39:48 +1000

On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 04:15:41PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> > Physical supervenience is not equivalent to assuming a concrete
> > primitive material world. The latter is an additional assumption.
>
>
> This depends entirely of what you mean by physical. If
> "physical-supervenience" alludes to the comp-physics, then ok. If this
> alludes to physics as understood by a aristotelian-matter physicist,
> then physical supervenience need it.
> Maudlin talk only about supervenience. For him it is just obvious that
> comp makes it physical. Of course he is wrong there (or UDA contains an
> error, but this remains to be shown).
> I have coined the term "physical supervenience", with "physical" having
> its standard aristotelian sense just to distinguish it with the
> comp-supervenience idea that mind relies on the immaterial computations
> (an infinity of them to be precise).
>
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>


Then this probably explains the confusion. Supervenience is merely
the statement that the physical tokens of a consciousness cannot be
identical for two different consciousnesses. The is independent of
whether those "physical tokens" are "stuffy" or not - remember I have
already bought your reversal of physical and mental explanations.

Since you have already used "physical" to refer to this appearance of
an objective universe, I merely thought you meant this classical
supervenience when contraposed against computational supervenience.

My point is that this classical supervenience is another way of
stating the anthropic principle, and it is essential to avoid the
whole idealist programme spiralling down the plughole of solipsism.

So what your really saying when you've shown COMP => - PHYS SUP is
that stuffy materialism is contradicted?? That unfortunately is not
how I've read the movie-graph argument - it is more like COMP =>
supervenience on multiple universes.

Cheers


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Received on Wed Aug 23 2006 - 18:52:15 PDT

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