On 02 Dec 2008, at 03:33, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
> Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> On 01 Dec 2008, at 03:25, Russell Standish wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 07:10:43PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>>> I am speaking as someone unconvinced that MGA2 implies an
>>>>> absurdity. MGA2 implies that the consciousness is supervening on
>>>>> the
>>>>> stationary film.
>>>>
>>>> ? I could agree, but is this not absurd enough, given MEC and the
>>>> definition of the physical superveneience thesis;
>>> It is, prima facie, no more absurd than consciousness supervening
>>> on a
>>> block universe.
>>>
>>>>> A block universe is nondynamic by definition. But looked at
>>>>> another
>>>>> way, (ie from the inside) it is dynamic. It neatly illustrates why
>>>>> consciousness can supervene on a stationary film (because it is
>>>>> stationary when viewed from the inside).
>>>> OK, but then you clearly change the physical supervenience thesis.
>>>>
>>> How so? The stationary film is a physical object, I would have
>>> thought.
>>
>>
>> I don't understand this. The physical supervenience thesis associate
>> consciousness AT (x,t) to a computational state AT (x,t).
>
> Stated this way seems to assume that the causal relations between
> the states are
> irrelevant, only the states matter.
Ah, please, add the delta again (see my previews post). I did wrote
(dx,dt), but Anna thought it was infinitesimal. It could be fuzzy
deltas or whatever you want. Unless you attach your consciousness,
from here and now, to the whole block multiverse, the reasoning will
go through, assuming of course that the part of the multiverse, on
which you attach your mind, is Turing emulable (MEC).
>
>
>> The idea is
>> that consciousness can be "created" in real time by the physical
>> "running" of a computation (viewed of not in a block universe).
>
> Well we're pretty sure that brains do this.
Well, my point is that for believing this, you have to abandon the MEC
hypothesis, perhaps in a manner like Searle or Penrose. Consciousness
would be the product of some non Turing emulable chemical reactions.
But if everything in the brain (or the genralized brain) is turing
emulable, then the reasoning (uda+mga) is supposed to explain why
consciousness (an immaterial thing) is related only to the computation
made by the brain, but not the brain itself nor to its physical
activity during the physical implementation. Your locally physical
brain just makes higher the probability that your consciousness
remains entangled with mine (and others).
>
>
>>
>> With the stationary film, this does not make sense. Alice experience
>> of a dream is finite and short, the film lasts as long as you want. I
>> think I see what you are doing: you take the stationary film as an
>> incarnation of a computation in Platonia. In that sense you can
>> associate the platonic experience of Alice to it, but this is a
>> different physical supervenience thesis. And I argue that even this
>> cannot work, because the movie does not capture a computation.
>
> I was thinking along the same lines. But then the question is what
> does capture
> a computation. Where in the thought experiments, starting with
> natural Alice
> and ending with a pictures of Alice's brain states, did we lose
> computation? Is
> it important that the sequence be time rather than space or some
> other order?
> Is it the loss causal relations or counterfactuality?
We "lose a computation" relatively to us when the computation is not
executed by a stable (relatively to us) universal machine nearby, be
it a cell, a brain, a natural or artificial universal computer.
In the case of the movie, it is no so bad. Consciousness does not
supervene on the movie or its projection, but the movie can be used as
a backup of Alice's state. We can re-project a frame, of that movie,
on a functionally well working Boolean optical graph, and Alice will
be back ... with us.
Of course the computations themselves, and their many possible
differentiations, are already in Platonia (= in the solution of the
universal Diophantine equation, in the processing of the UD, or
perhaps in the Mandelbrot set).
Alice's brain and body are "just" local stable artifacts belonging to
our (most probable) computational history, and making possible for
Alice consciousness to differentiate through interactions with us,
relatively to us.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Tue Dec 02 2008 - 12:58:28 PST