Brent Meeker wrote:
> 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.
But this is precisely my point - to sustain supervenience, there must
be a *unique* implementation of the 'computation' that is deemed
responsible for *unique* effects - in which case we are then free to
discard the metaphor of 'computation' and point to the physics as doing
the work. Perhaps there needs to be a distinction on this list (or have
I just missed it?) between:
C1) analyses of consciousness in terms of 'computation',
notwithstanding which any 'effect-in-the-world' is seen as reducing to
the behaviour of some specific physical implementation (i.e. as defined
on a non-computationally-established 'substrate');
C2) 'pure' computational analysis of consciousness, whereby any
'effect-in-the-world' is deemed invariant to 'implementation' (or more
precisely, all notions of 'implementation' - and hence 'the world' -
are alike defined on a computationally-established 'substrate').
C1 is computational theory within physicalism. C2 is what I understand
Bruno et al. to mean by 'comp'. The notion of 'implementation' doesn't
disappear in C2, it just becomes a set of nested 'substitution levels'
within a recursive computational 'reality'. This can be a major source
of confusion IMO. The point remains that you can't consistently hold
both C1 and C2 to be true. The belief that there is an invariant
mapping between consciousness and 'pure' computation (at the correct
substitution level) *entails* a belief in C2, and hence is inconsistent
with C1. This doesn't mean that C1 is *false*, but it isn't 'comp'. C1
and C2 have precisely opposite explanatory directions and intent.
Hence...you pays your money etc. (but hopefully pending empirical
prediction and disconfirmation).
> This is switching "computation" in place of "consciousness": relying on the idea that
> every computation is conscious?
I don't claim this, but this is apparently what Hofstadter et al. do
(IMO egregiously) maintain, having (apparently) missed the notion of
substitution level inherent in C2. Under C2, we can't be sure that
every 'computation' is conscious: because of substitution uncertainty
we always have the choice of saying 'No' to the doctor. Ant Hillary is
a case in point - AFAICS the only way to make an ant hill 'conscious' -
however you may *interpret* its behaviour - is to eat it (ughh!!) and
thereby incorporate it at the correct level of substitution. But for
me this would definitely be a case of 'No chef'.
David
> 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 Thu Oct 05 2006 - 07:24:02 PDT