Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> 2009/4/25 Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>:
>
>
>> This implicitly assumes that you can dispense with the continuum and
>> treat the process as a succession of discrete states. I question that.
>>
>
> So are you saying that, because we are conscious, that is evidence
> that reality is at bottom continuous rather than discrete?
>
>
>> It is how we think and how we write and describe computer programs and
>> we know that if we make the time step small enough in the simulation we
>> can accurately reproduce processes. But I think we are fooling
>> ourselves by taking the description in terms of discrete states to be
>> sufficient - actually we are relying on the physics of the computer to
>> join one state to the next. Bruno proposes to abstract this whole
>> process up to Platonia where the role of the computer in interpreting
>> the program is taken over by abstract computations. But then to avoid
>> any choice he must allow all possible (countably infinite) computations
>> between any two states. ISTM this implies a strange topology of states
>> and I'm not clear on how it models consciousness.
>>
>>
>>> Or maybe consciousness is only created
>>> from platonic objects / information or relationships that exist within
>>> them. The appeal of computationalism for me is that it creates a
>>> self-interpreting structure, the information or state has meaning only
>>> because it is part a state machine. We, being creatures who can only
>>> experience through time might be fooled into thinking change over time
>>> is necessary for consciousness, but what if we could make a computer
>>> that computed over the X-dimension instead of T, what would such a
>>> computer look like and how would it be logically different from a
>>> recording (which is static over T), and how is it logically different
>>> from a computer that computes accross the T dimension?
>>>
>>>
>> I don't think it is *logically* different. Before computers, a
>> computation was something written out on sheets of paper (I know because
>> my first summer job in college was calculating coordinates and depths
>> for a geological research company and my official job title was
>> "Computer".) :-)
>>
>
> Do you think a computation would feel different from the inside
> depending on whether it was done with pencil and paper, transistors or
> vacuum tubes?
>
>
>
No, I don't think the medium makes a difference. But interpretation
makes a difference. Most computations we do, on pencil and paper or
transistors or neurons, have an interpretation in terms of our world.
Kelly is supposing there is a "self-interpreting structure" I'm not sure
what he means by this, but I imagine something like an elaborate
simulation in which some parts of the computation simulate entities with
values or purposes - on some mapping. But what about other mappings?
Brent
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Received on Fri Apr 24 2009 - 20:47:54 PDT