On 17 May 2017 5:44 a.m., "Russell Standish" <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 03:49:37PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote: > > Is that not also true of consciousness supervening on a computers > execution of a program? What it is conscious "of" depends on its > relation to the environment - e.g. what the programmer intended to > represent. So, while unlikely, the same program might be "conscious > of" two quite different things > To the extent that it ought to be possible for any program to represent any other program by a suitable time-based transformation applied by an external observer, then yes. I think there's a subtlety here. If we're speaking about *physical* supervenience (which is after all the only kind that could be "observed" externally) then of course I agree with you and Brent that the relation with computation and hence, by assumption, with consciousness, becomes ambiguous in the sense that it's open to variation by extrinsic interpretation. I tend to agree that in this case the implication is so much the worse for this definition of supervenience. However, if we're speaking strictly of computational supervenience, then ISTM that no notion of "external observation" can now coherently apply. You can't speak of "observing" a computation unless you're already implicitly assuming physical supervenience. So on the strict assumption of computational supervenience without extraneous additions a computation simply is what it is, as it were, and as such is invulnerable to variation of extrinsic interpretation. So in this case there need be no ambiguity and the notion of supervenience seems to be robust in this respect. The consciousness is no longer supervenient on the original program, but on the transformation. I can't help feeling this is telling me something is awry with the definition of supervenience, rather than of computationalism or materialism. ISTM that the considerations outlined above may comprise an independent argument against the notion of physical supervenience in the computationalist framework. David -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
