On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 08:42:22AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:> > > On 16 May 2017, at 10:20, Russell Standish wrote: > > >On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 09:47:14AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > >> > >>On 16 May 2017, at 04:44, Russell Standish wrote: > >> > >>>On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 11:41:04AM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote: > >>>> >>> > >>>For some reason, people seem to believe that if a consciousness > >>>supervenes on A, then it must also supervene on the combined system > >>>A+B, for an arbitrary system B. > >> > >>We have discuss this before. I don't understand. If C supervenes on > >>A, it means only that a change in C necessitates a change in A. So > >>if C supervenes on A, it has to supervene on A + B, because a change > >>in C will necessitate a change in A + B. > > > >You are making an unwarranted assumption that A and B are > >independent. Just because A changes, does not entail that A+B > >changes. In > >these counter examples, B covaries with A such that A+B does not > >change when C changes. > > I don't succeed in imagining a simple example, still less a rock or > the UD*, where a change in "B" is capable of changing the > supervenience on "A", other than a change in the first person > indeterminacy (but this is taking into account by the abandon of the > physical supervenience: we know already that the first person > experience supervenes on all computations going through our state, > so that the physical does no more exist in fine, that is: the > reversal: it is the physical which, at that state, supervene on > infinitely many computations). > > If this is what you meant, then I am OK. It means eventually that > the comp-supervenience is incompatible with the physical > supervenience. Showing this was the goal of the MGA. Consciousness > supervenes on infinitely many computations (structured by > self-reference), and the physical has to emerge from the measure of > probability (or credibility) on all computations (again, structured > by the modal points of view associated to the machine by > incompleteness). >
The argument also works with the UD. No physical supervenience need be involved. In this case, lets say a conscious person a at a particular point in time supervenes on program A, and another distinct person a' at some distinct point in time supervenes on program A'. The UD consists of A+à = A'+Ã', where à denotes all programs other than A (unicode doesn't seem to offer a way of adding an overbar to a letter, so I'll use ̃ instead.). The conscious states a and a' differ, yet the UD A+à is identical to the UD A'+Ã', so we _must_ conclude that consciousness does not supervene on the dovetailer. I offer this as a counterexample to your alleged proof. The B in this case covaries from à to Ã'. I don't follow you (or David) that this necessarily implies physical supervenience is incompatible with computational supervenience, particularly when your work only implies inconsistency with physical ontology (aka primitive physics). Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.
