On 06 Oct 2015, at 01:49, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On 6/10/2015 9:54 am, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 10/5/2015 3:05 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
This, of course, is the heart of our disagreement. Your identity
is a lot more than your thoughts and feelings because those
thoughts and feelings only have meaning in a context. And it is
your physical body and immediate surrounds that provide that
context. You might be right about uploading if the uploading is
into an environment that is not too dissimilar from the current
context of your body. However, if your sensory inputs change to
any marked extent, you will certainly be aware that something has
happened. If the changes are too drastic and inexplicable, you
will quite probably go mad.
I agree that the hardware of your brain, per se, is not important.
But only if one form of hardware simulates the other, essentially
exactly. And if the wider environment is largely reproduced.
Consciousness supervenes on the physical brain, and replacing the
hardware does not alter this fact -- your consciousness still
supervenes on the physical substrate. It is not independent of it
as you wish to maintain.
It's not clear to me who is arguing for what. Stathis may think
that consciousness is independent of it's physical substrate, but I
don't see that he's arguing that here. He's arguing that there can
be more that one instance of "the same" consciousness. But it's
not clear what is meant by "the same". Does one think of one's own
consciousness as being the same as it was a second ago? an hour?
a year? twenty years? I think there must be degrees of
"sameness". Similarly, the degree will depend on the environmental
context and interaction. If you became completely immobilized I
think it would change your consciousness. Stephen Hawking is quite
different than he was 50yrs ago. If you had a chip implanted that
allowed you perceive the whole EM spectrum, including polarization,
it might well change your consciousness. Drugs and accidents
change people's personality and so, by inference, their
consciousness. So does just plain learning.
I agree. The argument has become a little unclear. As I understand
Stathis's position, he is arguing that since consciousness is a
computation, any physical instantiation of that computation lead to
the same consciousness -- the same person in fact. My objection was
really that such an idea makes no sense if you are considering
instantiations of that computation in different universes, or times
and locations outside out light cone. That is for two reasons --
first: there is no proof that any such 'copies' of our brain
activity actually exist; and second, even if they exist you can
never know that they exist, when or where. In addition, even if they
do exist, they can have no effect on you here and now -- they are
outside the light cone, after all.
Given these considerations, I would argue that since we cannot know
they exist, and they can have no effect even if they do exist, we
can simply ignore the possibility. It can make no difference to our
understanding of anything, one way or the other.
I think the basic problem arises from an attempt to reify Bruno's
computational theory. Bruno's idea seems to be that our
consciousness is essentially a particular computation, and that
particular computation will exist many times (probably an infinite
number of times) in arithmetic. So our particular consciousness, and
the environment in which it is found, is made up of the statistics
of the computations going through that conscious state. But an
essential element of this is that these computations exist only in
arithmetic -- they do not exist in a physical world -- they are not
physical operations of a physical "computer".
They might as well. I am not sure you can conclude this. The big (and
thus a bit gross) picture is that the physical is the border of the
mind of the universal Turing machine. It might be that it contains a
universal quantum dovetailer. It is an open question.
What is explained, is that you cannot use a special property of the
primary matter to select your computation(s) from arithmetic, without
introducing a non Turing emulable element in the working of the mind.
So eventually, if comp works well, primary matter will be taken as a
phlogiston or ether, we don't need it, and cannot use it.
So the attempt to identify these many computations running through
my consciousness with the existence of multiple copies of me in the
level one multiverse is simply a confusion of categories -- a
confusion of the (Platonic) arithmetic level with the (real-world)
physical level.
No, the confusion are avoided by distinguishing the points of view.
You have the truth (p), the belief, or what the machine can represent
to itself []p, the belief when attached to truth ([]p & p) that is the
knower or soul, or inner god, and then the matters, where consistency
(<>t) is added. So it is the same arithmetical truth seen by many
different persons (each has its ocn "[]") and views.
You come up with a strong ontological commitment about a "real
universe", but that is like using a miracle or a god to proceed. And
in this case, it is shown that such an assumption intoduces uncessary
difficulties, even unbearable if we believe that a brain is a mechanism.
Not unnaturally, this confusion leads to nonsense, such as the idea
that one's consciousness might continue in another universe if
something goes wrong in this universe.
I know it is not so amusing, but I don't see how this can be avoided
once we bet we can survive "qua computatio", that is in virtue of
being run by some universal machine.
The only way you can copy your consciousness, if that is indeed
possible, is to gather the information and make a copy using
standard physical processes. There is no magical "dual" fact about
consciousness such that it exists without that substrate.
Consciousness supervenes on the physical brain: if you have two
physical brains, you have two consciousnesses.
But once they differentiated, those two consciousness feel unique in
the usual sense, and does not live both experience at once, except in
the trivial sense that we are all the children of the "initial
amoeba", or any universal number.
Bruno
Bruce
Is the question really about "Can we achieve immortality by copying
to different substrates?" As Bruce points out we would only
preserve our "self" exactly up to the last copy event, since we
would have diverged from there. It's like making a backup on your
computer, it doesn't mean that nothing's lost when it crashes.
Brent
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