Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> Le 30-juin-06, à 21:34, Brent Meeker a écrit :
>
>
>
>>>John M:
>>>Does this agreed double(?) statement not rub too close
>>>on solipsism?
>>
>>Not if you accept that *all* our ideas of reality are models. The
>>fact that they work well and are
>>coherent makes me believe they are models of an external reality - not
>>a personal illusion - but I
>>can still doubt that they *are reality* itself. In other words I take
>>them to be like scientific
>>theories: provisionally accepted, but subject to refutation.
>
>
>
> You are not answering John, I think, Brent. A scientist who send a
> paper to a journal does not assume her aper will be read, he just hope
> for. To bet on the other's first person experience is not of the kind
> "scientific" and refutable.
Sure it is. Just because something cannot be directly experienced doesn't rule it out of a
scienctific model: quarks can't be observed, but their effects can. So I believe in other people's
first person experience because that is a good way to predict their behavoir. I consult a model in
which I use my first person experience to perdict how they will behave - this is called emphathizing
- and I find it works pretty well.
>
>
>>I have memories from when I was 5yrs old, but the source of identity I
>>feel in those memories arises
>>only from the fact that I remember a personal viewpoint in spactime
>>and I remember emotions.
>
>
>
> I agree.
>
>
>
>
>>Those
>>are the same aspects of memories of last week that make them coherent
>>with my model of myself as a
>>being who persists over time.
>
>
>
>
> All right, but at the first person level, there is a point where you
> *are* the model/theory/machine, like when you embed a map of Finland
> into Finland: as far as you allow "continuous" transformation of the
> map (remaining embedded in Finland) there will be a "fixed point": a
> point of the map which is exactly and literaly on the corresponding
> locality of Finland.
I don't understand the application of this analogy. When I say I have a model of the world (which
includes myself) I mean I have a set of concepts and rules for manipulating them that allows me to,
in a limited and provisional way to interact successfully with what I take to be an external
reality. This doesn't necessarily have the same topology as the external reality, so I don't see
how the fixed point theorem applies. The same would apply to my computer. It has a map of the
United States coded into its memory, but it is in a binary representation distributed across several
registers - a different topology than the planar surface of the United States. So while my
computer has a location in the U.S. (as I have in my model of reality) there is no point in my
computer memory that corresponds to the same point in the U.S.
> The diagonalization procedures can be used for finding the similar
> fixed point of computable transformations.
> Also: when you say "yes" to a "teleporting doctor", you assume the
> artificial brain is not just a model of yourself, but that it
> implements genuinely, albeit in a relative numerical way, you first
> person pasts/futures.
No, I only bet that it will have first person experiences as I would have if I had continued in my
biological form. I don't know what "implements genuinely" means - it seems to imply some extra
ingredient (spirit?) that makes an implementation "genuine".
Brent Meeker
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Received on Sat Jul 01 2006 - 13:55:55 PDT