Dear Bruno,
As far as I can tell, there would not be a “non active piece of matter”.
This is what causes a problem. On the other hand, I can see a fix for Mauldin’s
argument if we frame the supervenience principle in a way that is consistent
with the violation of Bell’s Theorem. We just have to use a Turing machine that
obeys quantum rules. What I find fascinating is that the unitary evolution of
the wave function acts as a computation all by itself. So a quantum system is a
computational system from its preparation, but the substitution rules would be
tricky: one cannot clone or copy its state.
I just want to understand if its possible to model a plurality of
computations.
Onward!
Stephen
From: Bruno Marchal
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 6:24 AM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: A comment on Mauldin's paper “Computation and Consciousness”
Hi Stephen,
If the "non active piece of matter" plays a role in the computation, it means
that we have not choose the correct substitution level. For example the brain
would be a quantum computer. But quantum computer are Turing emulable, and so
its work is emulated by the Universal Dovetailer, and the UDA (+MGA) goes
trough. That applies to Maudlin's argument as well.
Bruno
On 25 Jan 2011, at 10:04, Stephen Paul King wrote:
Dear Bruno and Friends,
I was re-reading the Mauldin paper again and something struck me that I
had not noticed before. I hope that I am not way over my head on this one, but
I think that there is something of a straw man in Mauldin’s definition of the
supervenience thesis! He assumes the principle of Locality .
We read on page 409 of “Computation and Consciousness”:
“If an active physical system supports a phenomenal state, how could the
presence or absence of a causally disconnected object effect that state? How
could the object enhance or impede or alter or destroy the phenomenal state
except via some causal interaction with the system? Since the phenomenal state
is entirely realized at the time of the experience, only the activity of the
system at that time should be relevant to its production. The presence or
absence of causally isolated objects could not be relevant. This is all the
supervenience thesis needs to say.”
Now, let us take a look at Bell’s theorem. From the wiki article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
“Bell's theorem has important implications for physics and the philosophy of
science as it indicates that every quantum theory must violate either locality
or counterfactual definiteness. In conjunction with the experiments verifying
the quantum mechanical predictions of Bell-type systems, Bell's theorem
demonstrates that certain quantum effects travel faster than light and
therefore restricts the class of tenable hidden variable theories to the
nonlocal variety.”
end quote
While we are considering the idea of “causal efficacy” here and not
hidden variable theories, the fact that it has been experimentally verified
that Nature violates the principle Locality. Therefore the assumption of local
efficacy that Mauldin is using for the supervenience thesis is not realistic
and thus presents a flaw in his argument. We cannot claim that only those
objects in some near distance or time of flight to the system that we propose
is a generator of phenomenal states are the only ones that are involved in the
emergence of the phenomenal states.
We have overwhelming experimental evidence that the classical assumptions
must be carefully examined to be sure that they are correct. The locality
assumption is flawed. So what if instead we question the contrafactual
definiteness aspect? If we disallow for the definiteness of contrafactuals then
Mauldin cannot construct Olympia and thus his argument does not work either.
Onward!
Stephen
PS, It is interesting that you mention reincarnation, Bruno. I too am
friendly toward that idea and I am a little bit motivated in my questions about
interactions with you by something that my wife mentioned to me in a
conversation that we had about the idea of reincarnation of souls. She asked
me” “Could bodies be necessary so that souls can interact with each other and
thus evolve?” By the way, the Syfy television channel’s series “Caprica”
explored a very cool computational version of reincarnation that you might find
amusing.
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