Le 07-août-05, à 22:20, Hal Finney a écrit :
> Rutgers philosopher Tim Maudlin has a paper intended to challenge
> certain
> views about consciousness and computation, which we have discussed
> occasionally on this list.
Indeed. Maudlin's paper is without doubt one of the most important
paper in the philosophy of mind literature. Note that Barnes' answer,
in the same journal, is worth reading too.
> It is called "Computation and Consciousness",
> Journal of Philosophy v86, pp. 407-432. I have temporarily put a copy
> online at http://www.finney.org/~hal/maudlin.pdf .
Many thanks for this. I urge people to download it at once! Then we
will have all the time to discuss it. It is equivalent (logically) with
my "movie-graph" argument. An analysis of Maudlin's in term of movie
graph is done (in french) in my Brussel's "thesis" and a shorter one in
my french Lille thesis.
Maudlin is responsible for relating this issue with the counterfactual
issue, which can be related quasi-directly to quantum logic, thanks to
a very cute and readable paper by Hardegree:
Hardegree, G. M. (1976). The Conditional in Quantum Logic. In Suppes,
P., editor, Logic and Probability in Quantum Mechanics, volume 78 of
Synthese Library, pages 55-72. D. Reidel Publishing Company,
Dordrecht-Holland.
I even tend to think that a refinement of Maudlin's paper (using
Hardegree) could lead to an elimination of the need of the Universal
Dovetailer Argument (but that is still a little bit speculative) to
derive the quantum from comp. Actually Russell did provide an hint in
that direction in his answer to Hal's post.
> This is a personal
> copy and I would ask you not to redistribute it.
I will try to get some authorization. It will be hard for me not
putting that paper in my webpage. Did you just scanned it. I would
acknowledge the fact. You can give me suggestion for preventing your
sending into jail ;-)
I will comment your post asap. Meanwhile, just note that what Maudlin
calls "supervenience", I prefer to call it "physical supervenience", so
that I keep a notion of comp-supervenience.
In a nutshell, Maudlin, like me, proves the incompatibility of digital
mechanism and materialism. Maudlin presupposes materialism, so he
concludes there is a problem with comp. I presuppose mechanism and
conclude there is a problem with materialism.
Have a nice week-end, Hal and all,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Fri Aug 12 2005 - 11:30:11 PDT