On 21 Nov 2008, at 10:45, Kory Heath wrote:
> However, the materialist-mechanist still has some grounds to say that
> there's something interestingly different about Lucky Kory than
> Original Kory. It is a physical fact of the matter that Lucky Kory is
> not causally connected to Pre-Teleportation Kory. When someone asks
> Lucky Kory, "Why do you tie your shoes that way?", and Lucky Kory
> says, "Because of something I learned when I was ten years old", Lucky
> Kory's statement is quite literally false. Lucky Kory ties his shoes
> that way because of some cosmic rays. I actually don't know what the
> standard mechanist-materialist way of viewing this situation is. But
> it does seem to suggest that maybe breaks in the causal chain
> shouldn't affect consciousness after all.
You are right, at least when, for the sake of the argument, we
continue to keep MEC and MAT, if only to single out, the most
transparently possible, the contradiction.
Let us consider your "lucky teleportation case", where someone use a
teleporter which fails badly. So it just annihilates the "original"
person, but then, by an incredible luck the person is reconstructed
with his right state after. If you ask him "how do you know how to tie
shoes", if the person answers, after that bad but lucky
"teleportation" "because I learn in my youth": he is correct.
He is correct for the same reason Alice's answer to her exams were
correct, even if luckily so.
Suppose I send you a copy of my sane paper by the internet, and that,
the internet demolishes it completely, but that by an incredible
chance your buggy computer rebuild it in its exact original form. This
will not change the content of the paper, and the paper will be
correct or false independently of the way it has flight from me to you.
In the bad-lucky teleporter case, even with MAT (and MEC) it is still
the right person who survived, with the correct representation of her
right memories, and so one. Even if just "luckily so".
MGA 2 then shows that the random appearance of the lucky event was a
red hearing, so that we have to admit that consciousness supervenes on
the movie graph (the movie of the running of the boolean optical
computer).
Of course I don't believe that consciousness supervene on the physical
activity of such movie, but this means that I have to abandon the
whole physical supervenience. I will read the other posts. I think
many have understood and have already concluded. But from a strict
logical point of view, perhaps some are willing to defend the idea
that the movie-graph is conscious, and, in that case, I will present
MGA 3, which is supposed to show that, well, a movie cannot think,
through MEC (there is just no computation there). Of course, the movie
has still some relationship with the original consciousness of Alice,
and this will help us to save the MEC part of the physical
supervenience thesis, giving rise to the notion of "computational
supervenience", but this form of supervenience does no more refer to
anything *primarily* physical, and this will be enough preventing the
use of a concrete universe for blocking the UDA conclusion.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Sun Nov 23 2008 - 07:19:11 PST