On Apr 24, 3:14 am, Jason Resch <jasonre....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> Kelly,
>
> Your arguments are compelling and logical, you have put a lot of doubt
> in my mind about computationalism.
Excellent!
It sounds like you are following the same path as I did on all of
this.
So it makes sense to start with the idea of physicalism and the idea
that the mind is like a very complex computer, since this explains
third person observations of human behavior and ability very well I
think.
BUT, then the question of first person subjective consciousness
arises. Where does that fit in with physicalism? So the next step is
to expand to physicalism + full computationalism, where the
computational activities of the brain also explain consciousness, in
addition to behavior and ability.
But then you run into things like Maudlin's Olympia thought
experiement, and Bruno's movie graph examples, and many other strange
scenarios as well.
So the next step is to just get rid of physicalism altogether, as it
has other problems anyway (why something rather than nothing, the
ultimate nature of matter and energy, the origin of the universe, the
strangeness of QM, etc. etc.), and just go with pure computationalism.
But in the thought experiments that led to the jettisoning of
physicalism, the possiblity appears of just associating consciousness
with information, instead of the computations that produce the
information.
So we seem to have two options: "computation + information" OR
"information".
I can't really see what problem is solved by including computation.
To me, assigning consciousness to platonically existing information
seems to be good enough, with nothing left over for computation to
explain. So, I go with the "just information" choice.
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Received on Sat Apr 25 2009 - 12:42:31 PDT