On 4/22/2017 7:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Apr 22, 2017 at 6:12 AM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 4/21/2017 3:42 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
John is accusing you of naive dualism. He says that you claim that
there is some mysterious substance (he finally called it a "soul")
that is not copied in your thought experiment. What I claim is this:
under physicalist assumptions, everything was copied. The problem is
that physicalism leads to a contradiction,
I don't agree that it leads to a contradiction. Can spell out what that
contradiction is?
Shortly (sorry for any lack of rigour):
If you assume computationalism, the computation that is currently
supporting your mind state can be repeated in time and space.
That's a dubious proposition. My mind state is dependent on my
environment, my perceptions, hormones in my body, radiation in my
blood. If QM is true the state of my body and brain probably cannot be
duplicated. So it becomes question of how much of all that is necessary
to my "mind state". I think this is a fairly difficult question and I'm
not satisfied with Bruno's simple answer that "it depends on the
substitution level". Not only is the boundary of region of that must
count as "environment" ill defined; the very concept of "mind state"
seems ill defined. We are apparently invited to perceive our "mind
state" introspectively - but when I "look inward" I only find a stream
of thoughts and feelings that come and go largely unbidden.
Maybe
your current computation happens in the original planet Earth but also
in a Universal Dovetailer running on a Jupiter-sized computer in a
far-away galaxy. Given a multiverse, it seems reasonable to assume
that these repetitions are bound to happen (also with the simulation
argument, etc.).
So what?
And yet our mind states are experienced as unique.
Who says so? How could this be known?
It
follows that, given computationalism, mind cannot be spatially or
temporally situated, thus cannot be physical.
That's like saying a chess game is not physical, because the same game
can occur at different times and places. But doesn't lead to any
contradiction I can see.
In this case we avoid dualism by reverting things: ok, so it is time
and space that are generated by mind.
Certainly we have a theory of the world that includes time and space. I
don't see that the theory leads to a contradiction. Muriel Ruckyser
said, "The world is made of stories, not atoms." But the stories are
about things, and without things to be about the stories could not exist
- they'd just be marks on paper, or 1s and 0s in simulations, they
wouldn't be stories.
Brent
I think.
Telmo.
Brent
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