On Apr 24, 3:14 am, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote: > Kelly, > > Your arguments are compelling and logical, you have put a lot of doubt > in my mind about computationalism.
Excellent! It sounds like you are following the same path as I did on all of this. So it makes sense to start with the idea of physicalism and the idea that the mind is like a very complex computer, since this explains third person observations of human behavior and ability very well I think. BUT, then the question of first person subjective consciousness arises. Where does that fit in with physicalism? So the next step is to expand to physicalism + full computationalism, where the computational activities of the brain also explain consciousness, in addition to behavior and ability. But then you run into things like Maudlin's Olympia thought experiement, and Bruno's movie graph examples, and many other strange scenarios as well. So the next step is to just get rid of physicalism altogether, as it has other problems anyway (why something rather than nothing, the ultimate nature of matter and energy, the origin of the universe, the strangeness of QM, etc. etc.), and just go with pure computationalism. But in the thought experiments that led to the jettisoning of physicalism, the possiblity appears of just associating consciousness with information, instead of the computations that produce the information. So we seem to have two options: "computation + information" OR "information". I can't really see what problem is solved by including computation. To me, assigning consciousness to platonically existing information seems to be good enough, with nothing left over for computation to explain. So, I go with the "just information" choice. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---