On 10/6/2015 10:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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.
Yes, like for example when you are duplicated at W and M, but still in
the box, before opening the box. There are two instantiation of the
same consciousness. From the 1p view, the person can be consistently
said to be unique, at both place at once. Once she opens the door, she
get the bit of information which differentiate her from her doppelganger.
But this is inconsistent with QM. Your view of conscious thoughts as
instantiated by computation implicitly assumes deterministic, classical
evolution of the brain, so that two identical brains with identical
perceptual inputs will have identical thought sequences, in analogy to
two computers running the same program. As the computations are
instantiated in arithmetic they are necessarily a unity, as there can be
only a single number 2. But QM says that the brains will very quickly
(microseconds) diverge. So if duplication were possible this could
provide a test of your theory - do the duplicate's thoughts diverge even
before the door is opened. Of course duplication of brains or people is
not possible - but duplication of computers is. Computers are
deliberately designed to act deterministically; we want them to
instantiate arithmetic, not QM. Yet they do instantiate QM and although
they will not diverge quickly, they too will diverge.
Brent
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