On 1/27/2011 8:34 PM, Rex Allen wrote:
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 4:12 PM, Brent Meeker<meeke...@dslextreme.com> wrote:
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.
I would have thought that dreams would be a pretty clear
counter-example to the claim that consciousness requires a world to
interact with...?
Do you think you could have dreams if you had never interacted with the
world?
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 7:58 PM, Brent Meeker<meeke...@dslextreme.com> wrote:
I think the whole world probably is Turing emulable, but then that does not
get rid of materialism. Material just becomes one of the things emulated
along with consciousness.
But then the material world we observe doesn't cause our
consciousness. Rather, the underlying emulation substrate (which we
have no access to) causes both the material world and consciousness.
That's possible, or it may be that the emulatated matter causes the
emulated consciousness; in which case we have the same questions about
consciousness we had before assuming the world is an emulation.
Brent
For instance, it would not be the case that neurons cause
consciousness...neurons wouldn't be an extra layer that existed
between us and the emulation substrate.
What exists would be the emulation substrate, going about it's
business of existing. As a (presumably) accidental side-effect of
that existence, there would be us with our experience of the world.
But, given the example of dreams - which aren't "of" anything external
to us (again, presumably) - why assume that there actually is a world
beyond our experience .
Perhaps the emulation substrate produces nothing but dreams?
Would there be any reason to predict that such an emulation substrate
would be governed by principles that we could comprehend? How would
it be different from the Kantian noumenal realm?
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