On Nov 24, 2008, at 3:28 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> MGA 1 shows that MEC+MAT implies lucky Alice is conscious (during the
> exam). OK?
> MGA 2 shows that MEC+MAT implies Alice is dreaming (and thus
> conscious)
> when the film is projected. OK?
I don't mean to hold up the show, but I'm still stuck here. I don't
understand how Lucky Alice should be viewed as conscious in the
context of MEC+MAT.
In a different message, you said this:
> But to go in the
> detail here would confront us with the not simple task of defining
> more precisely what is a computation, or what we will count has two
> identical computations in the deployment.
As complex as that task may be, I'm beginning to think that I can't
get past MGA 1 without tackling it.
Imagine that you have a grid of bits, and at each tick of the clock,
each bit is randomly turned on or off using a pseudorandom number
generator with a very long periodicity. Imagine that for some stretch
of time, the bits in the grid act "as if" they were following the
rules to Conway's Life. Are Conway's Life computations in fact being
performed? I thought "obviously no". The majority answer here seems to
be "obviously yes".
Suppose that we perform a very complex computation, and the result is
the integer "5". Should any computation that results in "5" be viewed
as performing the former computation?
Chalmer's paper "Does a Rock Implement Every Finite-State Automaton?"
seems directly relevant to all of these Lucky Alice thought
experiments. (Is it?) I need to re-read that paper.
I have no doubt that my thinking on these topics is confused. Where
should I begin?
-- Kory
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
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 Mon Nov 24 2008 - 12:51:22 PST