On 10/7/2015 2:14 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 7 October 2015 at 17:09, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:On 10/6/2015 10:39 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:On 7 October 2015 at 07:51, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: On 10/6/2015 1:18 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 6 Oct 2015, at 2:45 PM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: On 10/5/2015 6:24 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 6 Oct 2015, at 11:29 AM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: On 10/5/2015 5:14 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: From this comment it seems that you have an odd idea of how a person survives from moment to moment, as if they have a soul that needs to be transferred from one body to the other. That isn't how it works. If A1 survives as a later entity A2, it is necessary and sufficient that A1 and A2 have certain physical and psychological properties. No spark or soul needs to jump from A1 to A2, and they neither need to have any matter in common nor do they need to have any physical continuity, since these factors have no effect on experience. I disagree with that last. It's commonly assumed, because with shut our eyes and imagine scenes and we can compose dialog in our heads; but I think it is a mistake to think these can happen independent of some underlying physics - even if it's not "primitive" physics (whatever that is) which Bruno dismisses. But lack of physical continuity will not necessarily make a subjective difference, even if physics is needed to instantiate consciousness. Not necessarily if it is at a very low level, e.g. atoms. But if it's something noticeable, some difference in hormone levels, ... it will make a difference in thoughts. If the thought sequence can different with the things happening at the physical level of say neurons then it implies that supervenience is false and the mental and physical can go their own way (which is what we call "delusional"). I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at. I meant that if the normal sequence of brain states is s1-s2-s3 with corresponding mental states m1-m2-m3 and s2 is omitted, there is nothing in m3 to give any indication of the discontinuity. Of course, normally s2 is necessary in order to generate s1, but that doesn't change the argument. But I think that's wrong. Brains are not like ideal von Neumann computers or Turing machines that have "brain states" corresponding to "mental states". If you simulated a brain using a computer you would find that an enormous number of "brain states" were required to instantiate a single conscious thought and furthermore the brains states necessary for one thought overlapped with those necessary for the next thought. So this overlap at the low level is part of the physical continuity needed for consciousness. The fact that the physics can be simulated by discrete computation doesn't imply that the conscious states are discrete. If you simulated a brain on a computer and paused the computation for a while, would it make any difference to the consciousness generated?In an ideal computer, like a Turing machine, probably not. But that's because the brain would have to be simulated on a muchfiner time scale than that of conscious thoughts or experiences. The brain simulation would have include simulation of neuronalsignals in transit and overlapping other signals with certain timing.If the brain is Turing emulable then the emulation can be run on a general purpose computer, such as the one I am using now, provided it has enough memory. I can at any point save to disk, shut down the computer, and come back to it at a later time. What happens as a result of the interruption? Nothing, I say, unless you break the supervenience thesis, since the program runs exactly the same.
Yes, I said "probably not". I qualified it because the implicit assumption is that conscious thought is supervening on the computer processes and so you might wonder about what thoughts occur as registers are read off onto the disk and later as they are reloaded. Those things are abstracted away in ideal von Neuman computers, Turing machines and other mathematical abstractions of computation.
But aside from that, my original point was that mental states m1-m2-m3 are instantiated by something like brain "states" s1-s2-s3-....-s2345-s2346-s2347. And there's no sharp demarcation between m1 and m2 in terms of the brain states.
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