Stathis,
thinking about this way (which I did when reading Egan's Permutation
City) is indeed problematic - because then you would also have to let
consciousness supervene on Lucky Alice (the one from MGA), right down to
Super Lucky Alice (Alice which is "made" anew for every state through
random events).
In a materialist view, you can associate consciousness with states
directly (which leads to strange consequences, see MGA for instance); or
some part of the running is responsible - in which case you can't leave
out the causal dynamics or maybe the material substrate - but that isn't
computationalism anymore, because you must assume that the substrate is
not turing-emulable (otherwise you would just have to choose a
different, correct, substitution level).
That is why I agree with Bruno - IF you assume COMP - and you are
assuming it, I gather - then forget matter, and forget "running", and
forget "isolated" states - you will find your OMs in UD* - and as such,
the states s1 through s20 etc will only contribute to the measure of
histories for an OM, but will not constitute the OM _by themselves_.
In one sentence: The states s1 through s20 (or any others) will
contribute to the measure of a certain OM and the ingoing/outgoing
histories, independent of order, if they can be attributed to a
computation of an UD.
Cheers,
Günther
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> 2009/1/11 Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>:
>
>> I'm suggesting that "running a state" is incoherent.
>
> A machine running a program goes through a sequence of states.
> Consider 20 consecutive states, s1 to s20, which give rise to several
> moments of consciousness. Would you say that running the sequence s1
> to s20 on a single machine m1 will give a different conscious
> experience to running s1 to s10 on m1 and separately s11 to s20 on m2?
>
--
Günther Greindl
Department of Philosophy of Science
University of Vienna
guenther.greindl.domain.name.hidden
Blog: http://www.complexitystudies.org/
Thesis: http://www.complexitystudies.org/proposal/
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Received on Mon Jan 12 2009 - 11:01:11 PST