On 5/1/2019 2:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
My point is that "qualia" don't exist independent of an environment,
and an evolutionary history.
That is ambiguous. A human qualia needs a human history.
Human qualia are the only kind we know. Other qualia, independent of
environment and evolutionary history, would be "to speculate on
something that we have no evidence for".
But with mechanism, a human qualia can be encoded into a program or a
number, and copied.
That's the assumption of Mechanism. But it is not clear to me how the
semantics that allow the encoded qualia to refer to the environment are
preserved.
It is true for other “deep notion”. The work of Shakespeare needs also
a human long history, but you can copy the entire work of Shakespeare
on a disk.
But it can only be decoded into "The work of Shakespeare" in our
environment (or every similar).
If your point is that you would only say “yes” to the doctor, if he
copies your brain+a part of the environment, you are still in the
frame of the mechanist assumption, unless you explicit posit something
both not coinable in the environment and relevant for your conscious
state to survive the copy, but in that case, we are out of my working
hypothesis (at a place where I will ask why to speculate on something
that we have no evidence for).
But we do have evidence for it. Nature is quantum mechanical and that
puts limits on what is "coinable in the environment".
Brent
(Would Z1* depart from Nature, that would be such an evidence, but
that has not yet been shown.)
Bruno
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