Re: To observe is to......

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 11:49:15 +0200

Le 17-oct.-06, à 22:18, David Nyman a écrit :

> This is a really confusing (to me) aspect of comp v. 'standard
> computationalism' (and too often no clear distinction is made). Bruno
> argues (8th step of the UDA) - and I follow him in this - that for
> consciousness to supervene on computationalism, 'matter' can serve no
> explanatory role other than that of a placeholder for the 'relata'.


OK.



> Hence, under comp, 'matter' emerges from 'number', not vice versa.


OK.


> The
> 'yes doctor' argument appears to appeal to the possibility of 'actual
> material hardware' being utilised to instantiate consciousness
> computationally.

Yes. But it is explicitly a "supplementary hypothesis", which is
introduced for making the thought experiment easier, and which is
eliminated later. (The "beginners version" in eight step makes this
less explicitly, look at the older version in 15 steps perhaps).




> But there is still the crucial issue of 'substitution
> level' - instantiation must occur at the right layer of the hierarchy
> of nesting / recursion, so I suppose that in terms of this hierarchy,
> all notions of 'hardware' are themselves relational emergents.


Yes. Matter has to be redefine in term of a measure of the infinitely
many computational histories going through my states, and which are
undistinguishable relatively to the substitution level. Comp predicts
that if we look at ourself below our substitution level, then we can
measure the comp first person plural indeterminacy. That makes comp
testable, and even already confirmed by the quantum indeterminacy
(qualitatively with UDA), quasi-quantitatively by AUDA.


> No final
> theory of this appears to exist at present - ... <snip>

Yes yes it exists. UDA even shows that you got it by interviewing a
self-introspecting universal machine. That is something I try to
explain from time top time in the list, but the hardness comes from the
fact that it needs some knowledge in logic and computer science (and
then people complained 'cause it is technical).

Do you have some background in mathematical logic?

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list-unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Fri Oct 20 2006 - 05:50:37 PDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Feb 16 2018 - 13:20:12 PST