Neil Lion wrote:
>OK, so memory may be a first person experience to us, but would it be a
>first person experience to an actual physical computer? All the parts of a
>physical computer are mutually exclusive and rely on a specific physical
>organisation, existing in the third-person in relation to each other.
But you are postulating some physical or substancial absolute third-person
relations. I take for granted *only* relational number theoretical
third-person relations. All the rest from quark to hydrogen and dinosaure
are invariant pattern observable from some sharable point of view.
>Therefore, there is no real sense in which the physical computer is in the
>first-person with regards to anything.
Sure. But there is no physical computer outside your mind. There is only
type of immaterial relation between possible immaterial computer.
The physicality is an indexical. A possible world viewed from inside.
>It is always going to perceive its
>memory in a third-person sense. It perhaps is justified to say that that
>although this computer specifically is not conscious/1st-person, it is an
>example of an equivalent that does exist somewhere in the platonic world or
>in the multiverse, and so in a certain sense, is conscious, but this seems a
>bit dubious.
Let me try to put it in this way. No physical computer will ever been
able to be conscious. No physical brain, no body nor conglomerate of
bodies will ever be conscious. Nor will any physical universe be
able to contain anything conscious.
Only person or psychological beings can be conscious. Now you can
associate
a mind to a body or to a computer, but you cannot associate a computer,
a body, or a universe to a mind. You can, nevertheless associate an
infinity of (abstract and possible) body universe or machine to a mind.
Computationalism
in the cognitive science entails many-bodies for "unique" mind.
(almost the opposite of the many-minds interpretation of QM).
The physico/psycho traditional link does not work with comp, nor does it
work with the MWI.
To a 3-describable machine you can associate a mind, It could be polite!
But to a pure 1-undescribable experience you cannot attach a machine,
you can just attach a sheaf of similar/locally-fungible computational
histories. (See links in my URL).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal
Received on Tue Oct 02 2001 - 07:21:53 PDT