Peter Jones writes:
> 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.
OK, that is strictly true. Still, it is more elegant to postulate that no physical
world exists than that there exists (at least) a single quantum state which sustains
the entire apparent universe. I realise this is not a knock-down argument.
> > 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.
The A properties are mental, the B properties physical. Multiple physical processes
may implement the same computation, i.e. there is a one: many relationship between
the A properties and the B properties, respectively. This is not controversial, it is really
just a restatement of functionalism. However, it is the reverse situation which is
problematic, a many: one relationship between the mental and the physical, which you
will note is not consistent with the definition of supervenience given above. Maudlin
showed that just such a relationship would seem to hold between physical process and
consciousness. Even more simply, it is possible to interpret a single physical process as
implementing multiple computations, as I have discussed before. So the supervenience
thesis of computationalism seems flawed. If you are still keen on computationalism and
are willing to drop the supervenience thesis you end up with Bruno's version of comp.
If you think computationalism without the physical computers is absurd then maybe you
need to drop computationalism.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Jan 04 2007 - 09:54:31 PST