The singer, the song, and bootleg.

From: Emlyn (emlyn@one.net.au)
Date: Sun Dec 10 2000 - 03:07:35 MST


> Jason Joel Thompson <jasonjthompson@home.com> Wrote:
>
> >My PERSONAL SUSPICION (as yet unfounded in light of our current
> >understanding of the human brain,) is that our consciousness runs as
an
> >emergent sub-set of our current hardware and cannot be reduced to its
> >components in an effective fashion.
>

Ahh, that's the stuff I didn't read. Righto.

> If "emergent" is not just a euphemism for "magical" then this
consciousness
> generator of yours must be made of parts. If it's made of parts it can be
studied
> reductively.
>
> John K Clark jonkc@att.net
>

So if we take the hackneyed and probably misleading analogy of
consciousness-to-computer, the positions become these:

---
A program is a set of instructions to be carried out by a computer. It can
be incribed in a stone tablet as well as stored in computer.
A computer is a machine which knows how to interpret a set of instructions,
and do what they instruct it to.
A process is an instance of a program running on a computer. The same
computer, running the same program multiple times simultaneously, is running
multiple, distinct processes.
---
John (and the Dennet camp in general?) maintain that
consciousness/intelligence is the program. It is the pure information, the
set of intructions, and thus has all the properties of digital information;
particularly, it can be flawlessly copied. Copies are not distinct things;
they are all the same information, and so are the same.
Jason, and myself, and possibly David Chalmers (although I can't be certain
of this), propose that consciousness is somehow part of the running process;
it is distinct from the computer (or the wetware of the brain), it is also
distinct from (although well described by) the program, the instructions
which the machine is following; the way the brain is wired up.
Damien, and probably someone else in the world, takes a third position; that
intelligence/consciousness is actually the substrate, the computer, the
physical brain. More acurately, I think he proposes that it is the
combination of program and machine, the brain given a particular
configuration.
Am I correct in these attributions?
Emlyn


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:32:16 MST