2009/8/31 Flammarion <peterdjones.domain.name.hidden>:
Peter, surely you must see that in saying "abstracta are arrived at by
ignoring irrelevant features of individual objects" you are simply
agreeing with Quentin that "if everything is reduced to physical
interaction then computations aren't real". His argument clearly
shows that by "not real" he means that under PM there is no final
appeal to some 'abstract causal structure' beyond the physical. But
since I've never detected anything of this sort in your own views,
what precisely are you disputing? No coherent causal account in terms
of PM is at liberty to "ignore irrelevant features" in perpetuity.
The deal with PM is that, though such abstracted schemata are indeed
borrowed promiscuously, such loans are made on the strict
understanding of their being ultimately repayable in fully reduced
physical coin. Otherwise "ignoring their material constitution" is
tantamount to ignoring their existence.
Consequently, CTM in the context of PM is simply not a *physical*
explanation - in fact, it treats PM as *irrelevant* to the attribution
of consciousness. What it would take to make it a physical
explanation would be a method of showing exactly how each specific
instantiation of a putatively invariant computational consciousness is
separately reducible to a justified physical causal account of
consciousness. But this is infeasible for two reasons. Firstly CMT
under PM is a brute apriori assumption that makes no direct reference
to physical causality, and hence eludes any justification in terms of
it. Secondly, it is precisely this non-physical postulate of CMT that
masks what is a direct contradiction in terms. Under strictly
physical analysis, the equivalence it postulates - i.e. that
arbitrarily many heterogeneous PM dispositions (a) instantiate the
same homogeneous physical state (b) - simply evaporates, since in
making any plausible appeal to direct physical explanation (a) and (b)
could only coherently be characterisations of identical physical
systems.
David
>
>
>
> On 28 Aug, 18:15, Quentin Anciaux <allco....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>> 2009/8/28 Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden>:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> > Quentin Anciaux wrote:
>> >> 2009/8/27 Flammarion <peterdjo....domain.name.hidden>:
>>
>> >>> On 27 Aug, 08:54, Quentin Anciaux <allco....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>> >>>> 2009/8/26 David Nyman <david.ny....domain.name.hidden>:
>> >>>> This is because if consciousness is a computational process then it is
>> >>>> independant of the (physical or ... virtual) implementation. If I
>> >>>> perfom the computation on an abacus or within my head or with stones
>> >>>> on the ground... it is the same (from the computation pov).
>>
>> >>>> And that's my problem with physicalism. How can it account for the
>> >>>> independance of implementation if computations are not real ?
>> >>> Physcialism doesn't say that computations aren't real. It says
>> >>> real instances of computation are identical to physical processes.
>>
>> >> If everything is reduced to physical interaction then computations
>> >> aren't real. Also that doesn't answer how it account for the
>> >> independance of implementation. As the computation is not primary, how
>> >> 02 different physical process could generate the same computation
>> >> without abstract computations being the only thing that link the two
>> >> processes having existence. How can you make sense of church-turing
>> >> thesis if only "realized computations" make sense ?
>>
>> >> Regards,
>> >> Quentin
>>
>> > Try substituting "lengths" for "computations". Are lengths primary
>> > because the same length can occur in different physical objects?
>>
>> > Brent
>>
>> Why would I ? It's not the same thing at all... You could have said
>> substitute by 'red'... there are multiple physical red object.
>
> And there are multiple computaitons..
>
>> The thing is you can come up with an infinity of physical (possible)
>> realisation for a given computation.
>
> And and infinity of red objects.
>
>> So the question is what is
>> linking the computation to the physical realisation if not the
>> abstract rules (which don't exists with physicalism, because there
>> exists only "realized" computations... no abstract thing) ?
>
> Physicalism doesn't reject abstract entities, it rejects immaterial
> entities.
> Abstracta are arrived at by ignoring irrelevant features of individual
> objects.
> The die and the sugar cube both fall under "cubic" once their material
> constitution is ignored
>
> >
>
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Received on Tue Sep 01 2009 - 01:25:32 PDT