RE: computationalism and supervenience

From: Stathis Papaioannou <stathispapaioannou.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 10:27:14 +1000

Brent Meeker writes:

> > I think it goes against standard computationalism if you say that a conscious
> > computation has some inherent structural property. Opponents of computationalism
> > have used the absurdity of the conclusion that anything implements any conscious
> > computation as evidence that there is something special and non-computational
> > about the brain. Maybe they're right.
> >
> > Stathis Papaioannou
>
> Why not reject the idea that any computation implements every possible computation
> (which seems absurd to me)? Then allow that only computations with some special
> structure are conscious.

It's possible, but once you start in that direction you can say that only computations
implemented on this machine rather than that machine can be conscious. You need the
hardware in order to specify structure, unless you can think of a God-given programming
language against which candidate computations can be measured.

Stathis Papaioannou
_________________________________________________________________
Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail.
http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list-unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Mon Sep 11 2006 - 20:28:12 PDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Feb 16 2018 - 13:20:12 PST