Brent Meeker writes:
> 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.
Do you believe it is possible to copy a particular consciousness by emulating it, along
with sham inputs (i.e. in virtual reality), on a general purpose computer? Or do you believe
a coal-shovelling robot could only have the coal-shovelling experience by actually shovelling
coal?
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Wed Oct 04 2006 - 23:41:59 PDT