Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> Peter Jones writes (quoting SP):
>
> > > > > I'm not sure how the multiverse comes into the discussion, but you have
> > > > > made the point several times that a computation depends on an observer
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > No, I haven't! I have tried ot follow through the consequences of
> > > > assuming it must.
> > > > It seems to me that some sort of absurdity or contradiction ensues.
> > >
> > > OK. This has been a long and complicated thread.
> > >
> > > > > for its meaning. I agree, but *if* computations can be conscious (remember,
> > > > > this is an assumption) then in that special case an external observer is not
> > > > > needed.
> > > >
> > > > Why not ? (Well, I would be quite happy that a conscious
> > > > computation would have some inherent structural property --
> > > > I want to foind out why *you* would think it doesn't).
> > >
> > > I think it goes against standard computationalism if you say that a conscious
> > > computation has some inherent structural property.
>
> I should have said, that the *hardware* has some special structural property goes
> against computationalism. It is difficult to pin down the "structure" of a computation
> without reference to a programming language or hardware.
It is far from impossible. If it keeps returning to the same state,
it is in a loop, for instance. I am sure that you are tiching to point
out
that loops can be made to appear or vanish by re-interpretation.
My point is that it is RE interpretation. There is a baseline
set by what is true of a system under minimal interpretation.
The idea is that the
> same computation can look completely different on different computers,
Not *completely* different. There will be a mapping, and it will
be a lot simpler than one of your fanciful ones.
> the corollary
> of which is that any computer (or physical process) may be implementing any
> computation, we just might not know about it.
That doesn't follow. The computational structure that a physical
systems is "really" implementing is the computational structure that
can
be reverse-engineered under a minimally complex interpretation.
You *can* introduce more complex mappings, but you don't *have* to. It
is
an artificial problem.
> It is legitimate to say that only
> particular computers (eg. brains, or PC's) using particular languages arev actually
> implementing conscious computations, but that is not standard computationalism.
>
> Statthis Papaioannou
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Received on Wed Sep 13 2006 - 08:29:50 PDT