Re: computationalism and supervenience

From: Russell Standish <r.standish.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 09:01:14 +1000

On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 09:04:26PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> Is there any reason to believe that we would lose consciousness, or notice
> that anything strange had happened at all, if most or all of the parallel branches
> in the multiverse suddenly vanished?
>

I think this question is ill-posed, but I'll try to answer another
question that may have some bearing on what your trying to get at.

The Game of Life is known to be Turing complete. However, I do not
think any arrangement of dots in GoL could be conscious. Rather there
is an arrangement that implements a universal dovetailer. The UD is
quite possibly enough to emulate the full Multiverse (this is sort of where
Bruno's partail results are pointing), which we know contain conscious
processes.

This is what I believe Maudlin's argument is telling us.

So am I computationalist? On the most obvious level, no. However,
considering the above perhaps I am Bruno's sort of computationalist
with a very deep level of replacement (ie switching entire realities).

Confused? That would make two of us.

Cheers

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Received on Thu Aug 24 2006 - 19:03:09 PDT