On 3/27/2015 3:24 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2015-03-27 10:12 GMT+01:00 LizR <lizj...@gmail.com <mailto:lizj...@gmail.com>>:
On 27 March 2015 at 19:28, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com
<mailto:allco...@gmail.com>> wrote:
The ab asurdo is showing computationalism is incompatible with physical
supervenience, not that it is true.
Yes sorry, "reject" was a poor choice of words. I meant argue from the comp
position
rather than the materialist one, and know what I'm talking about.
In the end by being forced to accept consciousness must supervene on
the movie +
broken gate... If you believe it, then you've abandon computationalism
as a
theory of the mind as the movie+broken gates is not a computation... Or
you can
keep computationalism and abandon physical supervenience.... QED
Yes I realise that. The same applies to Maudlin. All I wanted to know at
the moment
was how the contradiction arises in the MGA.
It seems to me that's what I explained... it arises because under computationalism, it
is assumed consciousness is supported by a computation.... under computationlism +
physical supervenience, it assumed the computation is eventually supported by physcial
activity and eventually this leads to attribute consciousness to the record, which is
not a computation, contradicting the assumption of computationalism...
Which makes it clear that the MGA is not about breaking the consciousness-computation
link, it's about breaking the computation-physics link. If computation is an abstract
process that needs no physical instantiation and consciousness is realized by certain
computations, then consciousness needs no physical instantiation.
But a computation is linked to physics in two ways. In one it is realized by relations of
physical states acting as tokens. Secondly, it has meaning because of it's interpretation
in terms of the world; i.e. it is *about* something. The MGA says this aboutness is
provided by consciousness in the case of an computation that instantiates consciousness
and so the computation is providing it's own aboutness, i.e. it's own interpretation. But
I think this last step is wrong. I think the computation and the consciousness it
realizes are both relative to the world. The computation and the consciousness can only
have this aboutness in virtue of existing a "physical" world. Of course this world
doesn't have to literally be the physical world we exist in: it could be a Matrix world or
a brain-in-a-vat world. But in that case the consciouness is consciousness about that
world - not the world in which we see it as a recording.
Brent
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