2009/4/30 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>: >> Putnam and Searle use the Rock argument to suggest >> that computationalism is false: they consider it absurd that any >> conscious computation supervenes on any physical activity (or >> equivalently no physical activity, since at one extreme the Rock >> argument allows that any computation is implemented by the null >> state). > > ?
If the vibration of atoms in a rock can be mapped onto any computation, then there is a one to many relationship between a physical state and a computation. That is, you can't say that the rock implements one computation but not another. So the rock is a massively parallel computer implementing every computation. Furthermore, any subset (in time and space) of the rock is a massively parallel computer implementing any computation. At the limit, a minimal subset of the rock, such as a quark existing for one Planck interval, implements every computation. And why not go one step further and say that nothingness implements every computation? So you arrive at the conclusion, computation exists independently of physical activity. Few people seem satisfied with this conclusion, so they try to argue either that computationalism is false or else that computationalism is true and dependent on physical activity and therefore that the argument is invalid. -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---