On 13 May 2015, at 07:03, meekerdb wrote:
On 5/12/2015 8:03 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
meekerdb wrote:
On 5/12/2015 4:26 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
meekerdb wrote:
On 5/11/2015 11:14 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
[BM] Why? Have you proven that consciousness supervenes on a
record?
Have you proven that it does not?
No, but I have a lot of evidence it supervenes on brain /
*processes*/. Reducing that to /*states*/ is a further
assumption.
That is the pedant's reply. :-)
A process reduces to a sequence of states -- you simply lower the
substitution level (step rate) to whatever value is necessary to
reproduce the process FAPP.
No, a sequence of states is not the same as a process. In a
process the states in the sequence are causally related.
Need I quote Hume at you, Brent? That which we know as causality is
nothing more than the constant conjunction of events. You make
'causality' into a sort of dualist magic.
Whatever it is, it's what Bruno introduces to distinguish
computation from a playback of computation. I find the idea of
states of an extended body like the brain problematic. The speed of
light is finite and the speed of neurons is slow; so to model "the
state" as you propose means modeling it down microseconds or finer
in order to capture the signaling relation between different neurons
as their axons transmit pulses across several cm. This is way below
anything that might be considered a 'thought' or a 'conscious
momement', so the later have spacial extent and temporal overlap. To
conceive them as separate discrete states is already to concede that
consciousness is in platonia.
This means that in case you would grasp what is a computation, in the
Church-Turing sense, you would, like some computer scientist,
disregard the necessity of MGA. With comp, the ontology is discrete.
The continuum is recovered only in the mind of the numbers, like
eventually the physical laws.
But the reason why I distinguish a computation from a play-back, is
that a play black computes only trivial projections, , or arbitrary
computations, and the boolean graph computes quite complex and
specific relations.
This entails that consciousness is related to the (immaterial) number
relations, and *all* their relative implementations, not just one
specific, still less based on the dubious (never defined) primitive
matter.
Bruno
Brent
In playing back a *digitized* recording of states the causal
relation is broken. But, as I pointed out to Bruno, "causal" is a
nomological, not logical, relation. He, of course, disagreed.
The assumption of the argument was that consciousness
supervenes on the brain state.
That's not the same as saying yes to the doctor. It's your
added interpretation that consciousness supervenes on a brain
state as opposed to a brain process that constitutes a
computation. Bruno, who made the argument, I think is relying
on the latter.
Yes, that seems to be the case. The original claim of absurdity
for the idea that consciousness could supervene on a recording
has been replaced by the claim that the recording is not a
computation of the required kind. This also begs the question of
course -- where is it proved that that particular type of
computation is both necessary and sufficient for consciousness?
It's just hypothesized as implicit in saying yes to the doctor;
one would only say yes if it were a counterfactually correct AI.
However, I think one can approach this in a different way. The
overwhelming evidence from neuroscience, and all related
experimentation, is that consciousness supervenes on the physical
brain -- the goo in our skulls. Damage the goo, stimulate the
goo, do anything to the goo, and our qualia or consciousness are
altered. Alter our consciousness/thinking/processing and there
are associated changes in the brain activity/states. (Pet scans
and the like.)
The MGA argues that the natural sequence of brain states and a
recording of that sequence are not equivalent in that one is
conscious and the other is not. It is concluded from this that
consciousness does not supervene on the brain states/processes,
which conclusion is contradicted by the overwhelming bulk of
experimental evidence.
I agree with you and Russell that it is not obvious that
consciousness can't supervene on a playback of a recording. But, I
don't think there's any empirical evidence regarding recordings of
brains. In fact one of Russell's points is that the fact that
such a recording would be so large and detailed is a reason not to
trust intuitions about whether it could be conscious.
C'mon, Brent. It's a thought experiment. The fact that we don't
have experimental evidence of conscious recordings is irrelevant to
this particular thought experiment.
But I think it's jumping to a conclusion to say the supervenience on
brain activity is overwhelming evidence for supervenience on a
recording.
This is science. When your theory is contradicted by overwhelming
experimental evidence, it is conventionally taken as evidence
that your theory has been falsified. The MGA puts Bruno's theory
in this category: it has been falsified by the experimental
results.
Would that it were so. But so far as I can see Bruno's theory
doesn't make any definite predictions that can be empirically
tested. It explains a few things: quantum randomness=FPI and you
can't know what program you are. But these things also have other
possible explanations and they were already known.
Bruno does make a prediction that can be empirically tested. He
predicts that consciousness does not supervene on physical brains
but on computations. The MGA purports to show that the assumption
of physical supervenience leads to a contradiction. But
supervenience of consciousness on brains is an indisputable
empirical result, so the MGA works against comp.
But you, and I and others, have not agreed that his MGA shows that.
It shows that assuming consciousness supervenes on the physical
processes of a brain implies that it supervenes on a recording -
which he considers an absurdity. So having found a reductio it
becomes question of which step is wrong.
Brent
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