On 04 May 2009, at 13:31, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > 2009/5/4 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>: > >>> ... > >> It seems to me that we agree that physical supervenience leads to >> many >> absurdities. Is your argument purely academical, or do you think it >> can be used to prevent the conclusion that physics has to be >> explained >> by the purely mathematical notion of "most probable computation as >> seen from inside", among the 2^aleph_0 computations going through the >> current states, in UD* or in arithmetic? > > I agree with you. I am not terribly happy with the conclusion, because > it seems so weird. The only way out is, as you say, if comp is false: > the mind is not Turing emulable, or (even weirder, perhaps incoherent) > there is no such thing as consciousness at all.
Something conscious cannot doubt about the existence of its consciousness, I think, although it can doubt everything else it can be conscious *about*. It is the unprovable (but coverable) fixed point of Descartes systematic doubting procedure (this fit well with the self-reference logics, taking consciousness as consistency). Someone unconscious cannot doubt either ... (A zombie can only fake doubts) We live on the overlap of a subjective un-sharable certainty (the basic first person knowledge) and an objective doubtful but sharable possible reality (the third person belief). To keep 3-comp, and to abandon consciousness *is* the correct materialist step, indeed. But you cannot keep 1-comp(*) then, because it is defined by reference to consciousness. When you say "yes" to the doctor, we assume the "yes" is related to the belief that you will survive. This means you believe that you will not loose consciousness, not become a zombie, nor will you loose (by assumption) your own consciousness, by becoming someone else you can't identify with. > > > OK, I think. Thanks for taking the time to reply! You are welcome, Bruno (*) (usual comp is a 1-comp, 3-comp is "MEC-DIG-BEH" in "C&M", for Digital Behaviorist Mechanism in french, in a part translated by Kim on the list recently) http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
