We had some discussion of Maudlin's paper on the everything-list in 1999.
I summarized the paper at
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m898.html .
Subsequent discussion under the thread title "implementation" followed
up; I will point to my posting at
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m962.html regarding Bruno's version
of Maudlin's result.
I suggested a flaw in Maudlin's argument at
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m1010.html with followup
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m1015.html .
In a nutshell, my point was that Maudlin fails to show that physical
supervenience (that is, the principle that whether a system is
conscious or not depends solely on the physical activity of the system)
is inconsistent with computationalism. What he does show is that you
can change the computation implemented by a system without altering it
physically (by some definition). But his desired conclusion does not
follow logically, because it is possible that the new computation is
also conscious.
(In fact, I argued that the new computation is very plausibly conscious,
but that doesn't even matter, because it is sufficient to consider that
it might be, in order to see that Maudlin's argument doesn't go through.
To repair his argument it would be necessary to prove that the altered
computation is unconscious.)
You can follow the thread and date index links off the messages above
to see much more discussion of the issue of implementation.
Hal Finney
Received on Fri May 13 2005 - 13:03:38 PDT