>From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
>Your problem is that you are attached to a very naive (and vague!) theory
>of mind where the first person is attached to
>a particular "physical" instantiation of a computation.
>In 1988 I have build the movie-graph thought experiment (platonic
>destructive in the James Brown's nomenclature) which shows that
>this view is incompatible with comp. Maudlin has proved in 1989
>an equivalent result. Unlike UDA the graph movie argument *is*
>difficult (we discuss it at lenght in the list).
We discussed it; as I said then, it's wrong.
>If you want really be rigorous here you should solve first the
>very serious Putnam-Chalmers-Mallah's physical implementation problem.
>(see the thread on that implementation problem in the archive).
Indeed. Serious as in important. My proposal at
http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/100y.htm
can use refinement, so people who want to work on it can.
>I have not the Mallah's problem, because I have no universes at all.
>Just many computational histories, which together makes first person
>discourse possible.
Sorry to break it to you, but you do. A physical universe is not the
only (hypothetically real) mathematical structure that should implement
computations. Obviously, you believe that a universal dovetailer (a single
computation) implements all the computations it dovetails.
You also talk about "levels of substitution" and it sounds to me like
you believe that some mathematical structure implements the conscious
computation, with a "lower level" playing the role that "the physical world"
would (hypothetically) play. If all computations exist, then the
computations they implement should also exist. That helps determine the
measure distribution.
- - - - - - -
Jacques Mallah (jackmallah.domain.name.hidden)
Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate
"I know what no one else knows" - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum
My URL:
http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind
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Received on Sat Feb 24 2001 - 09:32:11 PST