Re: Consciousness is information?

From: Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:30:46 +1000

2009/4/30 Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>:

> This is essentially the problem discussed by Chalmers in "Does a Rock
> Implement Every Finite-State Automaton"
> at http://consc.net/papers/rock.html ,
>
> Yes. And I don't buy that argument. I will not insist because you did it
> well in your last post. Also, if it was the case that rock implement
> sophisticated computations, it would just add some measure on some
> computations in the Universal Dovetailing. Also, a rock cannot be a
> computational object: it is a projection of an infinity of computations when
> we look at the rock at a level which would be below our common substitution
> level. Eventually we will met the quantum vacuum (assuming comp implies QM,
> as I think), and in some "parallel world" that vaccum will go through all
> accessible states, but this is part of so many variate histories that they
> interfere destructively and does not generate any classical history stable
> relatively to any observer coupled with the rock.
>
>
> and I think it's also the idea behind Maudlin's Olympia thought experiment
> as well.
>
> Maudlin's Olympia, or the Movie Graph Argument are completely different.
> Those are arguments showing that computationalism is incompatible with the
> physical supervenience thesis. They show that consciousness are not related
> to any physical activity at all. Together with UDA1-7, it shows that physics
> has to be reduced to a theory of consciousness based on a purely
> mathematical (even arithmetical) theory of computation, which exists by
> Church Thesis.
> The movie graph argument was originally only a tool for explaining how
> difficult the mind-body problem is, once we assume mechanism.

The Rock argument and the Olympia/ Movie Graph argument are
diffferent, but they lead to the same conclusion if valid, namely that
if computationalism is true then consciousness does not supervene on
physical activity. Putnam and Searle use the Rock argument to suggest
that computationalism is false: they consider it absurd that any
conscious computation supervenes on any physical activity (or
equivalently no physical activity, since at one extreme the Rock
argument allows that any computation is implemented by the null
state). Chalmers tries to rescue computationalism in the paper cited
by arguing that the Rock argument is not valid.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Apr 30 2009 - 21:30:46 PDT

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