No, a decision procedure doesn’t have an output if you don’t run it.
This made me think that he was talking about the property of the output, so my misunderstanding was relative to that interpretation.
I personally think that consciousness is a property of MaybeZombie, and that L-zombies do not make sense, but the position I was trying to defend in this thread was that we can talk about the theoretical output of a function without actually running that funciton. (We might not be able to talk very much, since perhaps we can’t know the output without running it)
We are getting in a situation similar to the Ontological Argument for God, in which an argument gets bogged down in equivocation. The question becomes: what is a valid predicate of MaybeZombie? One could argue that there is a distinction to be made between such predicates as “the program has a Kolmogorov complexity of less than 3^^^3 bits” on the one hand, versus such predicates as “the program has been run” on the other. The former is an inherent property, while the latter is extrinsic to the program, and in some sense is not a property of the program itself. And yet, grammatically at least, “has been run” is the predicate of “the program” in the sentence “the program has been run”. If “has said ‘I must not be a zombie’ ” is not a valid predicate of MaybeZombie, then talking about whether MaybeZombie has said ‘I must not be a zombie’ is invalid. If one can meaningfully talk about whether MaybeZombie has said ‘I must not be a zombie’, then “has said ‘I must not be a zombie’ ” is a valid predicate of MaybeZombie. Since this predicate is obviously false if MaybeZombie isn’t run, and could be true if MaybeZombie is run, then this is a property of MaybeZombie that depends on whether MaybeZombie is run.
This made me think that he was talking about the property of the output, so my misunderstanding was relative to that interpretation.
I personally think that consciousness is a property of MaybeZombie, and that L-zombies do not make sense, but the position I was trying to defend in this thread was that we can talk about the theoretical output of a function without actually running that funciton. (We might not be able to talk very much, since perhaps we can’t know the output without running it)
We are getting in a situation similar to the Ontological Argument for God, in which an argument gets bogged down in equivocation. The question becomes: what is a valid predicate of MaybeZombie? One could argue that there is a distinction to be made between such predicates as “the program has a Kolmogorov complexity of less than 3^^^3 bits” on the one hand, versus such predicates as “the program has been run” on the other. The former is an inherent property, while the latter is extrinsic to the program, and in some sense is not a property of the program itself. And yet, grammatically at least, “has been run” is the predicate of “the program” in the sentence “the program has been run”. If “has said ‘I must not be a zombie’ ” is not a valid predicate of MaybeZombie, then talking about whether MaybeZombie has said ‘I must not be a zombie’ is invalid. If one can meaningfully talk about whether MaybeZombie has said ‘I must not be a zombie’, then “has said ‘I must not be a zombie’ ” is a valid predicate of MaybeZombie. Since this predicate is obviously false if MaybeZombie isn’t run, and could be true if MaybeZombie is run, then this is a property of MaybeZombie that depends on whether MaybeZombie is run.