Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> 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.
It is a mistake to infer that matter does not matter at all, that it is
dispensible.
The two cases you mention are not the same. In one you do not need any
particular kind of matter. In the other, you do not need matter at all.
> 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.
No, that is mistaken. The mental/computational properties supervene
on the physical properties in any particular realisation.
Computationalism
implies that mental properties can be multiply realised, true, but each
realisation
obeys supervenience.
> Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Jan 04 2007 - 07:38:20 PST