IUBio

Toward a Science of Consciousness 1998

Gary Forbis forbis at accessone.com
Sun Apr 26 12:12:46 EST 1998


Jim Balter wrote:

> For an *informed* discussion of the issues of computation, cognition,
> instantiation, and their relationship, I refer you once again to
>
> http://ling.ucsc.edu/~chalmers/papers/computation.html
>
> (and I will mention, once again for those who confuse people with their
> ideas, that this recommendation is not an endorsement of Chalmer's
> anti-materialism).

I like the paper's discussion concerning phenomenal properties under
"3.2 The organizational invariance of mental properties."  The final sentence
in this section: "If all this works, it establishes that most mental properties
are
organizational invariants: any two systems that share their fine-grained causal
topology will share their mental properties, modulo the contribution of the
environment"
states a truism that hinders the notion that his thought experiment is a
reductio ad
adsurdum.  Until we attempt the actual experiments we cannot know the level of
specification required to maintain behavioral invarriance.  He can be completely

right about his notion of implementation (and I think he is) and yet have missed

the boat concerning phonomenalogy simply because we lack the empirical evidence
to assert the right level of CSA description required.

In the whole, seeing these ideas develop over the years is very interesting.

--
--gary
    forbis at accessone.com
    http://www.accessone.com/~forbis





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