From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
But the problem with ontological type arguments is that they allow you to
conjure up anything you like by simply defining it as existing. If there is
a physical reality, things don't work like that. Statements of mathematics
and logic, however, are necessarily true (or false). This is what I meant
by
saying that mathematical structures exist necessarily: not that "17 is
prime" means you may meet a prime-looking number 17 walking down the
street,
but that 17 is necessarily prime, and not even God can change that. So *if*
there is no separate physical reality, and what we always thought of as
physical reality is just mathematical reality, it would solve the problem
of
why something rather than nothing exists, or why God exists, or why God
made
the world.
I haven't seen this line of argument before. But you could equally say
"A bachelor is necessarily unmarried", and thereby "deduce" that the
existence of bachelors is apriori necessary. And you can get away from
the apparent ontological commitment of saying "17 is prime" by playing
Russell's game of rearranging the natural-language statement of a
proposition
in order to reveal its true logical form, and announcing that what's
*really*
being said is "*If* 17 existed, *then* it would necessarily be prime". You
don't
get the existence of anything for free, that way.
Then there is the question of what it means to implement a computation. If
you look at it the right way, anything could be a computation. This has
been
given by John Searle as a reductio ad absurdum against computationalism,
and
explored by several other authors (eg. Hilary Putnam, David Chalmers, Greg
Egan). The usual counterargument is that in order to map a computation onto
an arbitrary physical process, the mapping function must contain the
computation already, but this is only significant for an external observer.
The inhabitants of a virtual environment will not suddenly cease being
conscious if all the manuals showing how an external observer might
interpret what is going on in the computation are lost; it matters only
that
there is some such possible interpretation. Moreover, it is possible to map
many computations to the one physical process. In the limiting case, a
single state, perhaps the null state, can be mapped onto all computations.
It's an odd sort of mapping! Look at it from the other direction. Suppose
that in reality, we have an object sitting there, doing nothing - in the
'null state'. You say that all possible computations are being implemented
there. What are you doing, reinterpreting the null state from moment to
moment so as to make it 'mean' whatever you want it to mean? This is
angels-dancing-on-a-pin stuff. At least functionalists insist that there's
structure on *both* ends of the mapping.
_________________________________________________________________
Advertisement: It's simple! Sell your car for just $20 at carsales.com.au
http://a.ninemsn.com.au/b.aspx?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fsecure%2Dau%2Eimrworldwide%2Ecom%2Fcgi%2Dbin%2Fa%2Fci%5F450304%2Fet%5F2%2Fcg%5F801577%2Fpi%5F1005244%2Fai%5F838588&_t=757768878&_r=endtext_simple&_m=EXT
-----
This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email
To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to:
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=11983
