On 10/2/07, Jesse Mazer <lasermazer.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>
> Vladimir Nesov wrote:
> >
> >Are you asking why I consider notion of p-zombieness meaningful?
>
> By "p-zombieness" are you referring to philosophical zombies? If so, I
> suppose I find them "meaningful" as a philosophical thought-experiment for
> making the case that facts about consciousness are at least partly
> independent from facts about the physical world, but I don't believe that
> any real-world implementation of a mind would be a philosophical zombie
> (see
> Chalmers' argument about 'fading qualia' at
> http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html ) -- do you?
I found this paper particularly mind-bogging. It turns about the argument
that since mind is implemented by brain, mind can't have a property that is
not present in given implementation. Which ignores the possibility that
there can be multiple minds that correspond to given implementation, and
there are implementations in other worlds that can receive the mind without
breaking subjective experience, even when from third-person POV you can
argue that there are strange things going on with mind that could correspond
to given contraption (which should instead be attributed to changes in set
of minds that corresponds to contraption in question).
Basically, I now define a mind by set of worlds in which it can find itself
subjectively. This set roughly corresponds to set of worlds that only differ
in things it doesn't know about, as if you jump from one world to another,
you won't notice it if only things you don't know about were changed. With
simplifying assumption that mind is implemented by a limited material
structure in each of these equivalent worlds, it's possible to say that all
worlds that contain the same implementation are equivalent, independent on
all the rest of their content. So, notion of complete worlds is useless, as
observations are selected arbitrarily in a way that is consistent with
observer. Worlds are constructed 'on the fly' from their fragments. Any
relation between parts of the world is a property of observer, because if it
didn't know about this relation, it would be undefined (arbitrary).
Observation (time) is a process of interaction between world fragments which
creates new fragments.
Brain-like structure has a very interesting property of being strongly
connected. Each element of the brain depends on other elements of it, so
sets of the worlds in which some of these fragments are present are very
similar. Functional elements of the same mind inhabit the same set of
worlds. More than that, brain learns tremendous amount of facts about its
environment, thus selecting a narrow and structured set of worlds consistent
with it. When brain is destroyed, elements become independent and mind
expands to bigger set of worlds, which corresponds to loss of structure it
can consistently observe.
--
Vladimir Nesov mailto:robotact.domain.name.hidden
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Received on Sun Oct 21 2007 - 13:34:06 PDT