Re: computationalism and supervenience

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 14:31:35 +0200

Le 07-sept.-06, à 01:56, Russell Standish a écrit :

> This simplest way of addressing this is to use your dovetailer instead
> of quantum multiverses, which tends to confuse people, and get
> associated with quantum mysticism. The dovetailer is obviously
> computable, but not the internal "trace" of one of its branches. (A
> point you have frequently made).


"First person branch" are not computable, yes.



>
> In fact lets go one further and write a program that prints out all
> combinations of 10^{30} bits in Library of Babel style. This is more
> than enough information to encode all possible histories of neuronal
> activity of a human brain, so most of us would bet this level of
> substitution would satisfy "yes doctor".
>
> So does this mean that the entire library of babel is conscious, or
> the dovetailer program (which is about 5 lines of Fortran)


I can believe a UD with 5 lines of Prolog. Five lines of Fortran? Send
us the code.



> is
> conscious?


No of course. Only people or person can be conscious. Person can be
attached to program, and person's live can be attached to computations.
But "attachment" is not identity.




> To me it is an emphatic no!


OK.



> Does it mean that one of the
> 10^{30} length bitstrings is conscious? Again I also say no. The only
> possible conscious thing is the subcollection of bitstrings that
> corresponds to the actions of a program emulating a person under all
> possible inputs. It will have complexity substantially less than
> 10^{30}, but substantially greater than the 5 line dovetailer.
>
>
>>> But I think we are headed in the direction of whether computable
>>> Multiverses really satisfy what we mean by computationalism. If
>>> someone copies the entirety of reality, do I still survive in a
>>> "folk"
>>> psychology sense. I am still confused on this point.
>>
>> How could you not survive that?
>>
>> Bruno
>>
>
> If I have inoperable brain cancer in reality A, and someone duplicates
> reality A to reality B, then unfortunately I still have inoperable
> brain
> cancer in reality B.
>
> Maybe I'm being too literal...


You loss me. If you are still complaining about an inoperable disease
in reality B, it means you did survive.



>
> I can also never experience your famous Washinton-Moscow teleportation
> excercise - in reality B I am still stuck in Brussels.


But in the WM protocol (step 3 of the 8 steps version of UDA, cf SANE
paper) you are supposed to be annihilated in Brussels. Are you telling
you are just dying in Brussels, in that situation. Well, that would
mean you assume some non comp hyp. It would be nice if you could sum up
your most basic assumptions.

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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Received on Fri Sep 08 2006 - 08:34:48 PDT

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