Hi Brent and Bruno,
From: Bruno Marchal
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2011 5:23 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: A comment on Mauldin's paper “Computation and Consciousness”
On 27 Jan 2011, at 22:12, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 1/27/2011 10:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Jan 2011, at 15:47, Stephen Paul King wrote:
<snip>
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.
I don't see how this would change anything in the argument, unless you
presuppose consciousness is not locally Turing emulable, to start with.
What does "locally" mean in this context? I doubt that consciousness is
strictly local in the physical sense; it requires and world to interact with.
It means that, when saying yes to the doctor, you will not only survive, but
you will feel the same physical laws. You will not change the relative measure
on your computations. It might be necessary to duplicate a part of the
environment, which, in that case has to be supposed to be Turing emulable in
that same sense. That is why I mention the notion of generalized brain. If the
environment is not Turing emulable, you have to use another theory of mind than
the mechanist one.
Consciousness per se, and first person, and matter (first person plural) are
not locally emulable. First person point of views are related with the infinite
continuum of computations going through their states, and that is not
algorithmic (assuming digital mechanism).
If my local body is a machine, my soul, I, is not a machine. I should say.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
[SPK]
I agree with this but with the caveat that my previously posted definition
was strictly physicalist. Bruno’s is the ideal mechanist version. I do not see
these as mutually contradictory.
Onward!
Stephen
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