Brent meeker writes:
> >>>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. The idea is that the
> > same computation can look completely different on different computers, the corollary
> > of which is that any computer (or physical process) may be implementing any
> > computation, we just might not know about it. 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
>
> I thought standard computationalism was just the modest position that if the hardware
> of your brain were replaced piecemeal by units with the same input-output at some
> microscopic level usually assumed to be neurons, you'd still be you and you'd still
> be conscious.
>
> I don't recall anything about all computations implementing consciousness?
>
> Brent Meeker
OK, this is the basis of our disagreement. I understood computationalism as the idea that it is the
actual computation that gives rise to consciousness. For example, if you have a conscious robot
shovelling coal, you could take the computations going on in the robot's processor and run it on
another similar computer with sham inputs and the same conscious experience would result. And
if the program runs on one computer, it can run on another computer with the appropriate emulation
software (the most general case of which is the UTM), which should also result in the same conscious
experience. I suppose it is possible that *actually shovelling the coal* is essential for the coal-shovelling
experience, and an emulation of that activity just wouldn't do it. However, how can the robot tell the
difference between the coal and the simulated coal, and how can it know if it is running on Windows XP
or Mac OS emulating Windows XP?
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Sep 14 2006 - 06:10:00 PDT