Bruno,
Perhaps all I am saying is that you need to state more explicitly the
assumptions about the connection between 1st and 3rd person, in both
MEC and MAT. Simply taking them to be the general ideas that you take
them to be does not obviously justify the argument.
Furthermore, stating the assumptions more clearly will make it more
clear where the contradiction is coming from, and thus which versions
of MEC and MAT the argument applies to.
--Abram
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 4:36 AM, Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>
> 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 - 16:12:20 PST