On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 9:52:25 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > On 3/25/2014 6:52 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: > > It is trivially a theorem of COMP, since the existence of such a > substitution level is the COMP axiom itself. If COMP is true, then the > substitution level is unknowable (although it can be honed in upon > scientifically). > > > I have trouble with this. How would you know if your consciousness were > different after the substitution? >
COMP is a bet that, if you chose the substitution level correctly, that "you", whatever "you" are, will survive the substitution. You can consult friends, introspect, make any measurement or think any thought you could have beforehand. It's like a change of reference frame in relativity. How do you "know" that a boost leaves the laws of physics unchanged? You make any measurement you like, and verify it. You can't know that the boost didn't cause your brain to act in such a way that you "just imagined" that the laws of physics were the same, but this is really just the same as "the laws of physics are the same". > I generally don't know why thought A comes to me instead of thought B. I > can see that after the substitution you could ask your friends if you > seemed different and you could compare your remembered past actions and > feelings to present ones in similar circumstances; but it seems to me it > would be impossible to say with any confidence that you had "survived" as a > stream of consciousness. > I don't know what you mean by "stream of consciousness". How could you ever verify that your "stream of consciousness" is unbroken, even ignoring the COMP duplication? How you you know that this moment right now isn't the only "real" moment you've ever experienced, all the others being false memories? These distinctions are positivistically meaningless. > If your friends said to acted similar to before, maybe a little different, > couldn't it be with quite rather different internal narrative - just as a > good actor could pretend and act like you. > If the actor is good enough, it IS you. This reminds me of something Maudlin brought up in a review of Penrose's second consciousness book. He points out that OF COURSE a computer can be programmed to behave just like Penrose -- i.e. pass a Turing Test as Penrose, answering exactly how Penrose would answer. This is completely uncontroversial, and for me, it "proves" COMP scientifically. If an agent can pass the Turing Test, it is conscious -- this is what we mean when we call other agents conscious. In fact, this is how we verify that we have been conscious in the past -- by Turing Testing our memories of ourselves. > Brent > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
