On 04 Dec 2008, at 15:58, Abram Demski wrote:
>
>> PS Abram. I think I will have to meditate a bit longer on your
>> (difficult) post. You may have a point (hopefully only pedagogical :)
>
> A little bit more commentary may be in order then... I think my point
> may be halfway between pedagogical and serious...
>
> What I am saying is that people will come to the argument with some
> vague idea of which computations (or which physical entities) they
> pick out as "conscious". They will compare this to the various
> hypotheses that come along during the argument-- MAT, MEC, MAT + MEC,
> "Lucky Alice is conscious", "Lucky Alice is not conscious", et
> cetera... These notions are necessarily 3rd-person in nature. It seems
> like there is a problem there. Your argument is designed to talk about
> 1st-person phenomena.
The whole problem consists, assuming hypotheses, in relating 1-views
with 3-views.
In UDA, the 1-views are approximated by 1-discourses (personal diary
notes, memories in the brain, ...). But I do rely on the minimal
intuition needed to give sense to the willingness of saying "yes" to a
digitalist surgeon, and the believe in a comp survival, or a belief in
the unchanged feeling of "my" consciousness in such annihilation-
(re)creation experiences.
>
>
> If a 1st-person-perspective is a sort of structure (computational
> and/or physical), what type of structure is it?
The surprise will be: there are none. The 1-views of a machine will
appears to be already not expressible by the machine. The first and
third God have no name. Think about Tarski theorem in the comp
context. A sound machine cannot define the whole notion of "truth
about me".
> If we define it in
> terms of behavior only, then a recording is fine.
We certainly avoid the trap of behaviorism. You can see this as a
weakness, or as the full strong originality of comp, as I define it.
We give some sense, albeit undefined, to the word "consciousness"
apart from any behavior. But to reason we have to assume some relation
between consciousness and possible discourses (by machines).
> If we define it in
> terms of inner workings, then a recording is probably not fine, but we
> introduce "magical" dependence on things that shouldn't matter to
> us... ie, we should not care if we are interacting with a perfectly
> orchestrated recording, so long as to us the result is the same.
>
> It seems like this is independent of the differences between
> pure-comp / comp+mat.
This is not yet quite clear for me. Perhaps, if you are patient
enough, you will be able to clarify this along the UDA reasoning which
I will do slowly with Kim. The key point will be the understanding of
the ultimate conclusion: exactly like Everett can be said to justify
correctly the phenomenal collapse of the wave, if comp is assumed, we
have to justify in a similar way the wave itself. Assuming comp, we
put ourself in a position where we have to explain why numbers
develops stable and coherent belief in both mind and matter. We can
presuppose neither matter, nor mind eventually, except our own
consciousness, although even consciousness will eventually be reduced
into our "believe in numbers".
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Fri Dec 05 2008 - 04:36:22 PST