Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> On 02 Dec 2008, at 22:24, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
>
>>>
>>> ....
>>> 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
>>
>> OK, that clarifies things and it corresponds with my intuition that
>> consciousness is relative to an environment. I can't seem to answer the
>> question is MG-Alice conscious "yes" or "no", but I can say she is
>> conscious
>> within the movie environment, but not within our environment. This is
>> similar
>> to Stathis asking about consciousness within a rock. We could say the
>> thermal
>> motions of atoms within the rock may compute consciousness, but it is a
>> consciousness within the rock environment, not in ours.
>
> Your consciousness is related to all computations going through your
> (current) brain states. I have not find any reason to think that a rock
> implement some consciousness, but if this is the case you have to take
> it into account for the general measure, given that in this case the UD
> will generate the rock computations too.
> Now, I don't think there is any consciousness in the movie, even it is
> generated in the UD. There is just no computation or relevant "physical"
> causality linkable to a computation in a movie.
But there is causality. The sequence of events in the movie are directly caused
by the projector, but they have a causal linkage back to Alice and the part of
her environment that is captured in the movie. I see no principled reason to
consider only the immediate cause and not refer back further in the chain of
causation.
> So consciousness can never be ascribed to anything physical,
Doesn't your argument imply the opposite? Consciousness can only be ascribed to
physical things because consciousness is computation and computation requires
causal links and causality if a physical relation.
Brent
>and thus we
> have reduce the mind body problem into the comp body problem; how does
> the appearance of matter emerge from the (immaterial) execution of the
> platonic deployment.
>
> Bruno
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
>
>
>
> >
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Received on Wed Dec 03 2008 - 13:23:04 PST