Peter Jones writes:
> > That's what I'm saying, but I certainly don't think everyone agrees with me on the list, and
> > I'm not completely decided as to which of the three is more absurd: every physical system
> > implements every conscious computation, no physical system implements any conscious
> > computation (they are all implemented non-physically in Platonia), or the idea that a
> > computation can be conscious in the first place.
>
>
> You haven't made it clear why you don't accept that every physical
> system
> implements one computation, whether it is a
> conscious computation or not. I don't see what
> contradicts it.
Every physical system does implement every computation, in a trivial sense, as every rock
is a hammer and a doorstop and contains a bust of Albert Einstein inside it. Those three aspects
of rocks are not of any consequence unless there is someone around to appreciate them.
Similarly, if the vibration of atoms in a rock under some complex mapping are calculating pi
that is not of any consequence unless someone goes to the trouble of determining that mapping,
and even then it wouldn't be of any use as a general purpose computer unless you built another
general purpose computer to dynamically interpret the vibrations (which does not mean the rock
isn't doing the calculation without this extra computer). However, if busts of Einstein were conscious
regardless of the excess rock around them, or calculations of pi were conscious regardless of the
absence of anyone being able to appreciate them, then the existence of the rock in an otherwise
empty universe would necessitate the existence of at least those two conscious processes.
Computationalism says that some computations are conscious. It is also a general principle of
computer science that equivalent computations can be implemented on very different hardware
and software platforms; by extension, the vibration of atoms in a rock can be seen as implementing
any computation under the right interpretation. Normally, it is of no consequence that a rock
implements all these computations. But if some of these computations are conscious (a consequence
of computationalism) and if some of the conscious computations are conscious in the absence of
environmental input, then every rock is constantly implementing all these conscious computations.
To get around this you would have to deny that computations can be conscious, or at least restrict
the conscious computations to specific hardware platforms and programming languages. This destroys
computationalism, although it can still allow a form of functionalism. The other way to go is to reject
the supervenience thesis and keep computationalism, which would mean that every computation
(includidng the conscious ones) is implemented necessarily in the absence of any physical process.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Tue Sep 12 2006 - 21:00:47 PDT