David Nyman wrote:
> Russell Standish wrote:
>
>
>>Maudlin say aha - lets take the recording, and add to it an inert
>>machine that handles the counterfactuals. This combined machine is
>>computationally equivalent to the original. But since the new machine
>>is physically equivalent to a recording, how could consciousness
>>supervene on it. If we want to keep supervenience, there must be
>>something noncomputational that means the first machine is conscious,
>>and the second not.
>>
>>Marchal says consciousness supervenes on neither of the physical
>>machines, but on the abstract computation, and there is only one
>>consciousness involved (not two).
>
>
> Is there not a more general appeal to plausibility open to the
> non-supervenience argument? We are after all attempting to show the
> *consequences* of a thoroughgoing assumption of comp, not prove its
> truth. Under comp, a specific conscious state is taken as mapping to,
> and consistently co-varying with, some equally specific, but purely
> computationally defined, entity. The general problem is that any
> attempt to preserve such consistency of mapping through supervention on
> a logically and ontically prior 'physical' reality must fail, because
> under physicalism comp *must* reduce to an arbitrary gloss on the
> behaviour at an arbitrary level of arbitrarily many *physical*
> architectures or substrates.
There is another possibility: that consciousness is relative to what it is conscious
*of* and any computation that implements consciousness must also implement the whole
world which the consciousness is conscious of. In that case there may be only one,
unique physical universe that implements our consciousness.
>In other words, a 'computation' can be
> anything I say it is (cf. Hofstadter for some particularly egregious
> examples).
This is switching "computation" in place of "consciousness": relying on the idea that
every computation is conscious?
Brent Meeker
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Received on Wed Oct 04 2006 - 22:01:52 PDT