On 05 Sep 2012, at 06:48, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 9/5/2012 12:14 AM, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/4/2012 7:19 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 06:48:58PM -0700, Craig Weinberg wrote:
I have problems with all three of the comp assumptions:
*yes, doctor*: This is really the sleight of hand that props up
the entire
thought experiment. If you agree that you are nothing but your
brain
function and that your brain function can be replaced by the
functioning of
non-brain devices, then you have already agreed that human
individuality is
a universal commodity.
Calling it a sleight of hand is a bit rough. It is the meat of the
comp assumption, and spelling it out this way makes it very
explicit. Either you agree you can be copied (without feeling a
thing), or you don't. If you do, you must face up to the
consequences
of the argument, if you don't, then you do not accept
computationalism, and the consequences of the UDA do not apply to
your
worldview.
I suppose I can be copied. But does it follow that I am just the
computations in my brain. It seems likely that I also require an
outside environment/world with which I interact in order to remain
conscious. Bruno passes this off by saying it's just a matter of
the level of substitution, perhaps your local environment or even
the whole galaxy must be replaced by a digital representation in
order to maintain your consciousness unchanged. But this bothers
me. Suppose it is the whole galaxy, or the whole observed
universe. Does it really mean anything then to say your brain has
been replaced ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE? It's just the assertion
that everything is computable.
Hear Hear! And if it is computable then it is nothing but
countable and recursively enumerable functions. But can functions
generate I/O from themselves?
You lost me. Functions are set of I/O.
We see nice examples of entire computable universes in MMORP games
that have many people addicted to them. One thing about them, we
require resources to be run. Nothing happens if you don't pay the fee.
*Church thesis*: Views computation in isolation, irrespective of
resources,
supervenience on object-formed computing elements, etc. This is a
theoretical theory of computation, completely divorced from
realism from
the start. What is it that does the computing? How and why does
data enter
or exit a computation?
It is necessarily an abstract mathematical thesis. The latter two
questions simply are relevant.
*Arithmetical Realism*: The idea that truth values are self
justifying
independently of subjectivity or physics is literally a shot in
the dark.
Like yes, doctor, this is really swallowing the cow whole from the
beginning and saying that the internal consistency of arithmetic
constitutes universal supremacy without any real indication of
that.
AR is not just about internal consistency of mathematics, it is an
ontological commitment about the natural numbers. Whatever primitive
reality is, AR implies that the primitive reality models the natural
numbers.
ISTM that Bruno rejects any reality behind the natural numbers (or
other system of computation). If often argues that the natural
numbers exist, because they satisfy true propositions: There exists
a prime number between 1 and 3, therefore 2 exists. This assumes a
Platonist view of mathematical objects, which Peter D. Jones has
argued against.
Platonism fails because it cannot explain how many minds
interact. It is a wonderful ontology theory of a single mind, but
not of many differing minds.
I don't see this at all. many minds comes from the fact that universal
machine can interact. That the easy thing to explain, seen also by
Schmidhuber and Tegmark, but as Deustch argued, this explains to much.
Yet Deustch critics either assumes non comp, or is inconsistent, as
comp implies the realities used by Schmidhuber and Tegmark. What the
three of them ignores is that this entails also the first person
indeterminacy, and this makes the idea of interaction or physics
entirely and necessarily retrievable from self-reference, and this
works well until now. Then we have the "Solovay" gift, the splitting
between provable and true-but-non-provable, whose intensional variants
explains completely the quanta/qualia divergence.
You keep saying that interaction is not explained by comp, but this
makes no sense, as a computation, even in arithmetic, is only a matter
of local interactions. It is the essence of computability to reduce
activity into local tiny elementary interactions. Then physical-like
interaction must be recovered at the more holistic level of the
machine's epistemological person views.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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