*Is it wrong to ask what the lattice is made of? Isn't some sort of
substrate necessary for any mathematical event, whether it be a brain or
a screen or a universe? And isn't that substrate sufficiently different
from the math to be called physical existence?
m.a.
*
Kory Heath wrote
> Imagine an infinite two-dimensional lattice filled with the binary
> digits of PI. (Start with any cell and fill in the digits of PI in an
> outwardly-expanding square spiral.) Imagine the rules of Conway's
> Life. We can point to any cell in this infinite lattice, and ask, "At
> time T, is this cell on or off?" For any cell at any time T, there's a
> mathematical fact-of-the-matter about whether or not that cell is on
> or off.
>
> My essential position is that these mathematical facts-of-the-matter
> play the role that "physical existence" is supposed to play for
> materialists. If, within that mathematical description of Conway's
> Life applied to the binary digits of PI, there are patterns of bits
> (i.e. patterns of mathematical facts) that describe conscious persons,
> I claim that those persons are in fact conscious (and necessarily so),
> because those mathematical facts are as real as anything gets. They're
> "all you need" for consciousness, and they're "all you need" for what
> materialists call "physical reality". We can perform acts of
> computation in our world in order to view some of those mathematical
> facts, but those acts of computation don't create consciousness.
>
>
>
> -- Kory
>
>
> >
>
>
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Received on Sat Nov 15 2008 - 20:22:23 PST