Peter Jones writes:
> Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> > Although you have clearly stated that the two ideas - consciousness
> > supervening on all physical processes and consciousness supervening on
> > no physical process - are completely different I think they are related in
> > that in both cases matter is irrelevant to consciousness,
>
> In the second case, matter is relevant to consc. since it is
> relevant to physical processes.
Did you mean "in the first case..."?
Matter is irrelevant to the extent that any piece of matter will do for a computation
and a change in the matter does not change the computation - unless you are
considering the special subset where the computation interacts with the substrate
of its implementation, which is all the computations we are ever going to encounter,
by definition.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
"A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties."
From this definition, the mental does not supervene on the physical in either
of the cases I mentioned.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Wed Jan 03 2007 - 22:14:32 PST