On 8 October 2015 at 08:44, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > > On 10/7/2015 2:30 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > > On 8 Oct 2015, at 4:36 AM, Brent Meeker < <meeke...@verizon.net> > meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > > > > On 10/7/2015 2:14 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > 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. > > > Wouldn't that be the same for any complex process that is being simulated? > > > Except for most complex processes there's no question that the result can > be analyzed and time sliced as well as the computation. But for > consciousness/thoughts/experiences/observer-moments there is this implicit > assumption that they are unanalyzable wholes/unities. > > There is a mapping between observable behaviour and consciousness. If a person is talking, there is the sequence of movements in the vocal cords and mouth and the sound being produced, and associated with this is the thinking about what is being said and voluntary movements of the relevant muscles. If the mechanics of talking is time sliced the individual slices may be meaningless, but in reconstruction sense is regained. I think this would be the same for the observer and the speaker, otherwise time slicing would cause a decoupling between the physical and the mental. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
