On 24 May 2015, at 10:21, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Saturday, May 23, 2015, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 22 May 2015, at 10:34, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Friday, May 22, 2015, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 21 May 2015, at 01:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com>
wrote:
<snip>
Partial zombies are absurd because they make the concept of
consciousness meaningless.
OK.
Random neurons, separated neurons and platonic computations
sustaining consciousness are merely weird, not absurd.
Not OK. Random neurone, like the movie, simply does not compute.
They only mimic the contingent (and logically unrelated) physical
activity related to a special implementation of a computation. If
you change the initial computer, that physical activity could mimic
another computation. Or, like Maudlin showed: you can change the
physical activity arbitrarily, and still mimic the initial
computation: so the relation between computation, and the physical
activity of the computer running that computation is accidental,
nor logical.
Platonic computation, on the contrary, does compute (in the
original sense of computation).
You're assuming not only that computationalism is true, but that
it's exclusively true.
That is part of the definition, and that is why I add often that we
have to say "yes" to the doctor, in virtue of surviving "qua
computatio". I have often try to explain that someone can believe
in both Church thesis, and say yes to the doctor, but still believe
in this not for the reason that the artficial brain will run the
relevant computation, but because he believes in the Virgin Mary,
and he believes she is good and compensionate, so that if the
artificial brain is good enough she will save your soul, and
reinstall it in the digital physical brain. That is *not*
computationalism. It is computationalism + magic.
But it's not obvious that *only* computations can sustain
consciousness. Maybe appropriate random behaviour can do so as well.
May be you need to add the Holy Water and the Pope benediction.
Alternatively, perhaps appropriate random behaviour would at least
not destroy the consciousness that was there to begin with, because
the real source of consciousness was neither the brain's normal
physical activity nor the random activity.
That is like the movie. It keeps the relevant information to reinstal
some instantaneous description on the boolean graph which was filmed.
Whatever possible makes the counterfactual correct in some
sufficiently large spectrum, makes the audittor of the entity
connected to the "real" person, which is an abstraction in Platonia.
I can't really see an alternative other than Russel's suggestion
that the random activity might perfectly sustain consciousness until
a certain point, then all consciousness would abruptly stop.
That would lead to the non sensical partial zombie. Those who says "I
don't feel any difference".
I think you illustrate my point. If we want to avoid partial zombie,
and keep the invariance of consciousness for the digital substitution,
we must recognize and understand that invoking a rome of matter or god
as a computation selector, appears as a magical explanation, like if
we should not isolate that measure with the means of computer science,
and then test it with the empirical physics.
Bruno
Go back several steps and consider why we think computationalism
might be true in the first place. The usual start is that computers
can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain.
OK.
So if something else can behave intelligently and substitute for
processes in the brain, it's not absurd to consider that it might
be conscious. It's begging the question to say that it can't be
conscious because it isn't a computation.
The movie and the lucky random brain are different in that respect.
The movie doesn't behave like if it was conscious. I can tell the
movie that mustard is a mineral, or an animal, the movie does not
react. it fails at the Turing tests, and the zombie test. There is
neither computations, nor intelligent behaviors, relevant with the
consciousness "associated' to the boolean circuit.
The "inimagibly lucky" random brain, on the contrary, does behave
in a way making a person acting like a p-zombie or a conscious
individual. We don't see the difference with a conscious being, by
definition/construction.
Well, if a random event mimics by chance a computation, that means
at the least that the computation exists (in arithmetic), and I
suggest to associate consciousness to it.
Then if I have the way to learn that from time t1 to time t2 the
neuron fired randomly, but correctly, by chance, that would only add
to my suspicion that the physical activity has some relationship
with consciousness. It is just a relative implementation of the
abstract computation. That one should have its normal measure
guarantied by the statistical "sum" on all computations below its
substitution level.
Now, the movie was a constructive object. A brain which is random
but lucky is equivalent with a white rabbit event, and using it in a
thought experiment might not convey so much. In this case, it seems
to make my point that we need very special event, infinite luck or
Virgin Mary, to resist the consequence of the idea that our
consciousness is invariant for Turing-equivalence. Matter becomes
then the symptom that some numbers win some (self) measure
theoretical game. Comp suggests we can explain the appearances and
relative persistence of physical realities from a statistical bio or
psycho or theo -logy. And that is confirmed by the "interview of the
Löbian machine" (by the results of Gödel, Löb, Solovay, Visser, ...).
Bruno
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