Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos  Now my question to you: If you think that a mind cannot be simulated on a computer with appropriate random inputs, then I believe you are saying that a mind is more than some combination of deterministic and random events. Could you please describe the third thing that is included? If it is easier, you can describe the third thing that is involved in libertarian free will. |
Ok, this is just stuff I haven't really thought through properly but let me know what you think.
We shouldn't be focussing on where the mind fits into the physical world, but how physical things fit into the mind. It's not that the mind is
more than a combination of deterministic and random events as if it is something extraneous to those things. It could be that all physical events are relationships completely contained and constructed from qualitative experiences. Consider any "physical thing". Surely, it must consist of a quantitative relationship between two or more variables, ie, how two or more "things" vary with respect to each other. So after we have exhaustively described this relationship in terms of quantities, does it change the nature of the quantities if we conceive of the relationship as being between this quality or that quality? In other words, do the dimensions of a square care whether they are red or blue? I say not.
But they have to have
some quality to them otherwise there is no relationship to observe; there are no "things" that actually vary between one another. You may be thinking that the variables in any physical relationship are just physical entities. If so, then what are the variables that constitute the relationship of
those physical things? And so on, ad infinitum.
So if there can't be physical reality without qualitative reality then the computer simulation thought experiment doesn't even get off the ground. In other words, imagining there are circumstances where a string of logical commands running through a bunch of computer chips
are not conscious is an illusion. No physical thing suddenly "gets to be consicous". Physical things are contructed from consciousness.
How I don't know
