Hal writes
> 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
> ...
> 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.
It seemed to me that he made a leap at the end.
> (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.)
I know that Hal participated in a discussion on Extropians in 2002 or 2003
concerning Giant Look-Up Tables. I'm surprised that either in the course
of those discussions he didn't mention Maudlin's argument, or that I have
forgotten it.
Doesn't it all seem of a piece? We have, again, an entity that either
does not compute its subsequent states, (or as Jesse Mazer points out,
does so in a way that looks suspiciously like a recording of an actual
prior calculation).
The GLUT was a device that seemed to me to do the same thing, that is,
portray subsequent states without engaging in bonafide computations.
Is all this really the same underlying issue, or not?
Lee
Received on Sat May 14 2005 - 02:02:33 PDT