Le 20-juil.-06, à 22:38, Jesse Mazer a écrit :
> So, do you think that the idea of "psychophysical laws" whose sole
> purpose
> is to decide if larger computations contain instantiations of smaller
> ones,
> and therefore contribute to their overall measure, violates
> "computationalism" as you understand it? If so, why?
Chalmers does not talk on measure and certainly misses the com first
person indeterminacy, and thus the "supervenience of the physical laws"
on "many computations" (number theoretical laws).
I can understand why he feel obliged to cut the UDA at the start, given
that UDA shows that the computationnalist hypothesis makes the physical
somehow ontologically secondary, he bets on current physical laws at
the start. As the summary recall this also makes consciousness role
doubtful, and from a comp pov, its explanation seems to be again a
reduction, despite what he says, to a lower level which then could be
known (as a theory of consciousness for example). But comp prevents
such a theory is ever possible.
If psychophysical laws are coherent with comp, they must be extracted
from a measure on the 1-indeterminacy.
A daunting task. As a mathematician I have study the logic of the
"certainty" corresponding to that measure (this by the "lobian
interview").
I can clearly say that I got an arithmetical quantization, but more
work need to be done to evaluate that comp hyp.
Alas I don't know if Chalmers cut the UDA so early because he gets the
consequences or because he does not seen one, but at the ASSC
(Association for the study of consciousness) they are not so much
interested apparently in the consequence of taking comp seriously. Is
Naturalism or Physicalism a taboo? Are there other reasons? I don't
know.
> Well again, leaving aside the details of Chalmers' ideas, do you think
> there
> is anything non-computationalist about the type of "psychophysical
> laws" I
> suggest above, which are solely concerned with the question of how
> larger
> computations contribute to the measure of smaller ones by containing
> instantiations of them?
No I agree with this. Especially if you take the 1-3 distinction into
accounts.
> Such laws might very well say that the movie-graph
> or the ticking of a clock does not qualify as a valid instantiation of
> some
> complex computation corresponding to a particular observer-moment.
But comp entails that such laws cannot exist. The first person
consciousness associated to a 2-dimensional brain movie frame, well,
from your 3-person point of view, that first person will survive
relatively to you if you are kind enough to re-implement the comp state
from the movie in a locally stable universal machine. But from its own
point of the view the (first person) will survive in all consistent
computationnal histories going through those states. Now this is
testable in the sense that this eventually determine the laws of
physics (but not geography nor history!).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Fri Jul 21 2006 - 08:07:54 PDT