On 12/5/2019 9:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 5 Dec 2019, at 02:12, Bruce Kellett <bhkellet...@gmail.com
<mailto:bhkellet...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 10:44 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<everything-list@googlegroups.com
<mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a
consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a
response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,
It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to
what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my dog
died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The
counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding the
counterfact I get another dog. The same thing eventuates
tomorrow. Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when
I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.
Hence Mechanism is false.
I think the point Bruno is making is that consciousness requires
"counterfactual correctness”,
Not just “consciousness”, also the simpler notion of computation
requires or even define a notion of counterfactual correctness. It is
not much more than a semantic for the “if A then B else C”.
by which he appears to mean that consciousness must be such that if
the inputs are changed (counterfactually), then the output must also
change.
… must also change (counterfactually). OK.
This hypothesis -- that consciousness requires this "counterfactuall
correctness" -- was introduced ad hoc in order to protect the movie
graph argument. If we take the sequence of states through which a
computation proceeds to give a particular conscious experience and
reproduce exactly those states on a film or something similar, then
running through those states will reproduce the same conscious
experience. They want to avoid this conclusion, so they impose the
restriction that the sequence of state must be "counterfactually
correct", i.e., it must respond differently to different input --
which the movie graph, being fixed, clearly cannot.
Who they? Not me, and Maudlin makes that move to get a reductio ad
absurdum of having both mechanism and materialism. Then at the end he
choses materialism, where I keep Mechanism, but both Maudlin and me
showed that indeed it is absurd to believe in both mechanism and the
idea that consciousness is related exclusively to some material events.
That this ad hoc manoeuvre does not prove anything about
consciousness was shown by Maudlin in his "Olympia" argument.
That is weird. Maudlin, and men did prove something about
consciousness, mechanism and materialism.
We show that materialism -> non mechanism, or equivalently that
mechanism -> non materialism. You can’t have them both.
But it assumes that computation exists in the abstract...simply because
there's a thing we invented called the existential quantifier. It's as
weak as St Anslem's ontological proof; which tellingly Goedel thought he
could make sound.
Brent
One can restore counterfactual correctness by additional ad hoc
additions to the graph, without altering the fact that the movie
record still reproduces the conscious experience.
But the added piece have no role in the actual computation, and so
that would endow the movie with consciousnes, but also the movies with
the holes, and all consciousness will supervene on anything, making
the theory inconsistent.
It is much simpler to study what is a computation, and understand that
consciousness is in the computation, not in this or that
implementation of the computation, except statistically below our
substitution level.
The "competition" is irrelevant to consciousness in this case.
?
Bruno
Bruce
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