Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> 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?
That would be my present guess.
>Or do you believe
> a coal-shovelling robot could only have the coal-shovelling experience by actually shovelling
> coal?
Probably not. But from a QM viewpoint the robot and the coal are inevitably
entangled with the environment (i.e. the rest of the universe); so I don't consider
it a knock-down argument.
Brent Meeker
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Received on Thu Oct 05 2006 - 00:25:30 PDT