Quentin, Bruno:
Quentin Anciaux wrote,
>Hi Stathis,
The fact that comp => no material world is this:
1- If comp is true, then you (the 1st person) is defined by all computations (an infinity) that pass through your state, hence the "you" does not belong to one and only one computation.
Yes.
>2- Then as you cannot associate you with a computation you won't be able to do it in a so called material world if any, because the material world is perceive through you and you by the preceding point is generated by all computation going through this point, hence material world is useless.
You mean that since you can't know which computation generates your present moment, you also can't point to which computer is generating that computation. That makes sense, assuming the UD is running and your consciousness is a result of the UD. On the other hand, if your consciousness is the result of physical processes in a single human brain, you *can* point to the computer.
>The demonstration of Bruno is based on physical supervenience (whether or not a change in the physical level implies a change in the computation level). I think the olympia machine of lee maudlin and the movie graph argument of Bruno show that a computation does not supervene on the material level.
This is the difficult issue of what implements a computation. I don't see why a physical system must handle counterfactuals to implement a computation, which seems to be taken as given. Is it because without it any physical system implements any computation (hence, all conscious experiences, if computationalism is correct)? A way around this is to say that all computations are, in fact, implemented everywhere, but only those implemented by a well-behaved computer can interact with the physical world. This would mean that the UD is in fact run (at least contingent on the existence of anything at all, but perhaps necessarily - i.e. by virtue of the existence of computations as mathematical objects), so that every thought we have is massively parallel. Most of the thoughts we have would thus be generated by the UD, but those not (as it were) anchored in the physical world would lead to instantaneous chaos, hence would not be part of a recognisable stream of consciousness. Hence, it is possible that (a) an infinitesimal proportion of possible OM's for a given person are at least partly implemented in the physical world, (b) an infinitesimal proportion of that subset are in fact implemented in the real world, (c) we cannot know where a particular OM is being implemented (even if that question is meaningful), but nevertheless, all the OM's strung together to make up a person's stream of conscious are of the type that has a subset implemented in the real world.
>Another thing is, if you are part of a computation, and somehow someone succeed to throw you out of it and tells you that now you are in the real world... How could you know this one is real (despite the fact that you know the preceding wasn't in front of evidence showed to you) ? If the first wasn't real, then why this would be ? why a primary real would exists in this system ?
If it is *possible* that we are living in a simulation, then we cannot be sure that we aren't. However, we assume that we aren't because there is no reason to think that we are. This is not to say *what is the case* (because only a god outside of reality could actually know this), but rather what we should *tentatively believe* is the case. The world looks flat, so we should believe it is flat, but if evidence arises suggesting we are wrong, we should change this belief.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Mon Jul 17 2006 - 10:15:48 PDT