Bruno Marchal writes:
> Le 02-déc.-06, à 06:11, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
>
> > In addition to spectrum reversal type situations, where no change is
> > noted from
> > either 3rd or 1st person perspective (and therefore it doesn't really
> > matter to anyone:
> > as you say, it may be occurring all the time anyway and we would never
> > know), there is
> > the possibility that a change is noted from a 1st person perspective,
> > but never reported.
> > If you consider a practical research program to make artificial
> > replacement brains, all the
> > researchers can ever do is build a brain that behaves like the
> > original. It may do this because
> > it thinks like the original, or it may do it because it is a very good
> > actor and is able to pretend
> > that it thinks like the original. Those brains which somehow betray
> > the fact that they are
> > acting will be rejected, but the ones that never betray this fact will
> > be accepted as true
> > replacement brains when they are actually not. Millions of people
> > might agree to have these
> > replacement brains and no-one will ever know that they are committing
> > suicide.
>
>
> Well, in the case comp will be refuted (for example by predicting that
> electrons weigh one ton, or by predicting non eliminable white rabbits)
> , then everyone will be able to guess that those people were committing
> suicide. The problem is that we will probably copy brain at some level
> well before refuting comp, if ever.
> The comp hyp. entails the existence of possible relative zombies, but
> from the point of view of those who accept artificial brains, if they
> survive, they will survive where the level has been correctly chosen. A
> linguistic difficulty is that the "where" does not denote a place in a
> universe, but many similar "instants" in many consistent histories.
But how good a predictor of the right level having been chosen is 3rd person
observable behaviour?
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Mon Dec 04 2006 - 18:33:11 PST