2008/11/28 Kory Heath <kory.domain.name.hidden>:
> I still feel like I don't have a handle on how you feel the move to
> Platonia solves these problems. If we imagine the mathematical
> description of filling a 3D grid with the binary digits of PI,
> somewhere within it we will find some patterns of bits that look as
> though they're following the rules to Conway's Life. If we see
> creatures in there, would they be conscious? What about the areas in
> that grid where we find the equivalent of Empty-Headed Alice, where
> most of the cells seem to be "following the rules" of Conway's Life,
> but the section where a creature's "visual cortex" ought to be is just
> filled with zeros? In other words, why doesn't the "partial zombie"
> problem still exist for us in Platonia?
Asking questions like this about platonic objects isn't like asking
the same questions about objects in a physical world. Abstract
threeness is not a kind of picture of what we would recognise as
threeness in the physical world: three objects, or five objects which
could be seen as two lots of two and one lot of one object, or the
Arabic numeral "3". Similarly, you can't point to a picture of a
physical computer and ask whether that is giving rise to a particular
computation in Platonia. Threeness, computations and consciousness
exist eternally and necessarily, and can't be created, destroyed or
localised.
I realise this coming close to regarding consciousness as akin to the
religious notion of a disembodied soul. But what are the alternatives?
As I see it, if we don't discard computationalism the only alternative
is to deny that consciousness exists at all, which seems to me
incoherent.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Sat Nov 29 2008 - 22:52:48 PST