On 30 Nov 2008, at 04:23, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
> Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> On 29 Nov 2008, at 15:56, Abram Demski wrote:
>>
>>> Bruno,
>>>
>>>> The argument was more of the type : "removal of unnecessay and
>>>> unconscious or unintelligent parts. Those parts have just no
>>>> perspective. If they have some perpective playing arole in Alice's
>>>> consciousness, it would mean we have not well chosen the
>>>> substitution
>>>> level. You are reintroducing some consciousness on the elementary
>>>> parts, here, I think.
>>>>
>>> The problem would not be with removing individual elementary parts
>>> and
>>> replacing them with functionally equivalent pieces; this obviously
>>> preserves the whole. Rather with removing whole subgraphs and
>>> replacing them with equivalent pieces. As Alice-in-the-cave is
>>> supposed to show, this can remove consciousness, at least in the
>>> limit
>>> when the entire movie is replaced...
>>
>>
>> The limit is not relevant. I agrre that if you remove Alice, you
>> remove any possibility for Alice to manifest herself in your most
>> probable histories. The problem is that in the range activity of the
>> projected movie, removing a part of the graph change nothing. It
>> changes only the probability of recoevering Alice from her history
>> in,
>> again, your most probable history.
>
> Isn't this reliance on probable histories assuming some physical
> theory that is
> no in evidence?
Not at all. I have defined "history" by a computation as see from a
first person (plural or not).
Of course, well I guess I should insist on that perhaps, by
computation I always mean the mathematical object; It makes sense only
with respect to to some universal machine, and I have chosen
elementary arithmetic as the primitive one.
Although strictly speaking the notion of computable is an epistemic
notion, it happens that Church thesis makes it equivalent with purely
mathematical notion, and this is used for making the notion of
probable history a purely mathematical notion, (once we got a
mathematical notion of first person, but this is simple in the thought
experience (memory, diary ..., and a bit more subtle in the interview
(AUDA)).
A difficulty, in those post correspondences, is that I am reasoning
currently with MEC and MAT, just to get the contradiction, but in many
(most) posts I reason only with MEC (having abandon MAT).
After UDA, you can already understand that "physical" has to be
equivalent with "probable history" for those who followed the whole
UDA+MGA. "physical" has to refer the most probable (and hopefully)
sharable relative computational history.
This is already the case with just UDA, if you assume both the
existence of a "physical universe" and of a concrete UD running in
that concrete universe. MGA is designed to eliminate the assumption of
"a physical universe" and of the "concrete UD".
>
>
>> IThere are no physical causal link
>> between the experience attributed to the physical computation and the
>> "causal history of projecting a movie".
>
> But there is a causal history for the creation of the movie - it's a
> recording
> of Alice's brain functions which were causally related to her
> physical world.
Assuming MEC+MAT you are right indeed. But the causal history of the
creation of the movie, is not the same "computation" or causal chain
than the execution of Alice's mind and Alice's brain during her
"original dream". If you make abstraction of that difference, it means
you already don't accept the physical supervenience thesis, or, again,
you are introducing "magical knowledge" in the elementary part running
the computation.
You can only forget the difference of those two "computations" by
abstracting from the physical part of the story. This means you are
using exclusively the computational supervenience. MGA should make
clear (but OK, I warned MGA is subtle) that the consciousness has to
be related to the genuine causality or history. But it is that very
genuineness that physics can accidentally reproduced in a non genuine
way, like the brain movie projection, making the physical
supervenience absurd.
It seems to me quasi obvious that it is ridiculous to attribute
consciousness to the physical events of projecting the movie of a
brain. That movie gives a pretty detailed description of the
computations, but there is just no computation, nor even genuine
causal relation between the states. Even one frame is not a genuine
physical computational states. Only a relative description of it. In a
cartoon, if you see someone throwing a ball on a window, the
description of the broken glass are not caused by the description of
someone throwing a ball. And nothing changes, for the moment of the
projection of the movie, if the cartoon has been made from a real
similar filmed situation.
To attribute consciousness to the stationary (non projected)
contradict immediately the supervenience thesis of course.
All this is a bit complex because we have to take well into account
the distinction between
A computation in the "real" world,
A description of a computation in the "real" world,
And then most importantly:
A computation in Platonia
A description of a computation in Platonia.
I argue that consciousness supervenes on computation in Platonia. Even
in Platonia consciousness does not supervene on description of the
computation, even if those description are 100% precise and correct
I said a long time ago that a counting algorithm is not a universal
dovetailer, despite the fact that a counting algorithm can be said to
generate all the description of all computations (meaning also that
natural numbers and the successor function, but without addition and
multiplication law, are not enough). A UD does compute, in the
arithmetical platonia, it does not just enumerate the description of
the computations.
It is subtle, a bit like the difference between "A implies B", and
"the deduction of A from B" in Logic. In the interview of the Lobian
machine, those distinctions remains subtle but at least can be made
mathematically transparent. (But this is not needed to understand the
UDA-MGA or UDA(1...8).
>
>
>> The incremental removing of
>> the graph hilighted the lack of causality in the movie.
>
> It seems to me there is still a causal chain - it is indirected via
> creating the
> movie.
OK, but you cannot say that Alice is conscious from 3h30 to 3h45 by
supervening on an event which is "another story" than the computation
supposed to be done by the graph for that experience. The
"indirectness" you mention is enough to discredit the physical
supervenience thesis.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Sun Nov 30 2008 - 12:33:30 PST