Re: Tegmark is too "physics-centric"

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 05 Mar 2004 14:20:54 +0100

At 09:08 03/03/04 +1100, Russell Standish wrote:
>On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 12:28:04PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> > >
> > >RS As I understand it, COMP refers to the conjunction of:
> > >
> > >1) Arithmetic realism
> > >2) Church-Turing thesis
> > >3) Survivability of consciousness under duplication
> >
> >
> >
> > BM...and annihilation of the "original" (if not it could be trivial). I
> guess
> > that's what you intended to mean.


and I add, digital "duplication". (that's why Church thesis has to be
called for)


>How does COMP entail that I am a machine? I don't follow that step at all.


But comp *is* the assumption that I am a machine, even a digital machine.
My last formulation of it, easy to remember is that comp = YD + CT + RA
YD = Yes doctor, it means you accept a artificial digital brain.
(and CT is Church thesis, and RA is some amount of arithmetical realism).
In "conscience et mecanisme" comp is called MEC-DIG-IND, DIG is for
digital, and IND is for indexical. It really is the doctrine that I am a
digital
machine, or that I can be emulated by a digital machine.



> > Computationnalism is really the "modern" digital version of "Mechanism"
> > a philosophy guessed by early Hindouist, Plato, ... accepted for animals by
> > Descartes, for humans by La Mettrie, Hobbes, etc. With Church
> > thesis mechanism can leads to pretty mind/matter theories.
> >
>
>If one accepts mechanisms that go beyond the Turing machine, then
>computationalism is a stricter assumption than mere mechanism (which I
>basically interpret as "anti-vitalism").
>
>I would counter that a Geiger counter hooked up to a radioactive
>source is a "mechanism", yet the output cannot be computed by a Turing
>machine. (Of course some people, such as Schmidhuber would disagree
>with that too, but that's another story).

But no mechanism can compute the output of any self-duplication.
With Everett formulation of QM, a Geiger counter is emulable by a turing
machine, and the QM indeterminacy is just a first person comp indeterminacy.
You cannot emulate with a turing machine the *first person* knowledge
he/she gets from looking at the Geiger counts, but no machine can
predict the first person knowledge of a Washington/Moscow self-duplication
either.

Bruno
Received on Fri Mar 05 2004 - 08:27:10 PST