Dear Quentin,
The supervenience thesis is separate from the Turing thesis and Mauldin
does a good job in distinguishing them. The problem that I see is in the
properties of physicality that are assumed in Mauldin’s argument. It is one
thing to not be dependent on what particular physical structure a computation
can be run on (assuming a realistic supervenience), it is another thing
entirely to say that a Turing machine can be “run” without the existence of any
physical hardware at all. I am trying to make this distinction and trying to
fix this problem that I found in the supervenience thesis within Mauldin’s
argument. He does point out that there are contrafactuals that must have some
physical instantiation. We see this on page 411 where he wrote:
“The only physical requirement that a system must met in order to instantiate a
certain machine table are that (1) there must be at least as many physically
distinguishable states of the system as there are machine states in the table,
(2) the system must be capable of reacting to and changing the state of the
tape, and (3) there must be enough physical structure to support the
subjunctive connections specified in the table.”
It is in the subjunctive connections that we see the contrafactuals
expressed. If one’s model of physical reality does not allow for the necessary
subjunctive connections to be implemented then the supervenience thesis would
fail independent of the Turing thesis. My point is that we need to be careful
about what exactly do we mean by “causally inactive piece of matter”. If there
is material present within a physical system that does not affect the 3
requirements above then surely we can agree with Mauldin’s claim, but if there
is a problem with the faithfulness of the model of what physicality involves,
then this must be fixed if possible. This is why I say that there is a bit of a
straw man in his argument.
Mathematical structures do not “do” anything, they merely exist, if at all!
We can use verbs to describe relations between nouns but that does not change
the fact that nouns are nouns and not verbs. The movie graph is a neat trick in
that is abstracts out the active process of organizing the information content
of the individual frames and the order of their placement in the graph, but
that some process had to be involved to perform the computation of the content
and ordering cannot be removed, it is only pushed out of the field of view.
This is why I argue that we cannot ignore the computational complexity problem
that exist in any situation where we are considering a optimal configuration
that is somehow selected from some set or ensemble.
Another question that I am asking is what relation does information have
with matter. We had a paper that seems to propose that information is physical
and then goes on to make some strange claims. We also had a recent paper that
discusses how “information is converted into free energy” by a Maxwell
Demon-type feedback system. It seems to me that there is a lot of confusion
about what relationship there is between information and matter, so my
inquisitiveness could be seen as an attempt to make sense of this mess.
One idea that could be proposed is that information is a relationship in
a triple such that a difference exists between two that makes a difference for
the third. I am sure that this can be put into more formal terms. Turing
Machines aside, we are not really getting to the problem until we have a good
set of tools with which to examine the question of how to determine the
substitution level of a given system and even if substitution is possible. We
can play with theoretical concepts and toy models all of our lives, but if and
until they have concrete physical realizations they are mere figments of our
imaginations.
Onward!
Stephen
From: Quentin Anciaux
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 8:07 AM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: A comment on Mauldin's paper “Computation and Consciousness”
Hi Stephen,
Well the asumption is that the mind is turing emulable... a turing machine is a
mathematical object. When I wrote a program what it does is only dependant on
the computation which is performed, that computation does not depend on the
actual physical computer that will instantiate it hence it does not depend on
any piece of matter and surely not on a causaly inactive piece of matter inside
that particular physical computer.
If it did depend on it, I could'nt write programs in the first place without
knowing on what it will run.
1+1=2 even if you use rocks to do it and even for big value of 1...
Regards,
Quentin
2011/1/25 Stephen Paul King <stephe...@charter.net>
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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