Why do you say, “Besides, most people actually take the opposite approch: computation is the most “real” thing out there, and the universe—and any consciouses therein—arise from it.”
Euan McLean said at the top of his post he was assuming a materialist perspective. If you believe there exists “a map between the third-person properties of a physical system and whether or not it has phenomenal consciousness” you believe you can define consciousness with a computation. In fact, anytime you believe something can be explicitly defined and manipulated, you’ve invented a logic and computer. So, most people who take the materialist perspective believe the material world comes from a sort of “computational universe”, e.g. Tegmark IV.
Soldier mindset.
Here’s a soldier mindset: you’re wrong, and I’m much more confident on this than you are. This person’s thinking is very loosey-goosey and someone needed to point it out. His posts are mostly fluff with paradoxes and questions that would be completely answerable (or at least interesting) if he deleted half the paragraphs and tried to pin down definitions before running rampant with them.
Also, I think I can point to specific things that you might consider soldier mindset. For example,
It’s such a loose idea, which makes it harder to look at it critically. I don’t really understand the point of this thought experiment, because if it wasn’t phrased in such a mysterious manner, it wouldn’t seem relevant to computational functionalism.
If you actually want to know the answer: when you define the terms properly (i.e. KL-divergence from the firings that would have happened), the entire paradox goes away. I wasn’t giving him the answer, because his entire post is full of this same error: not defining his terms, running rampant with them, and then being shocked when things don’t make sense.
I reacted locally invalid (but didn’t downvote either comment) because I think “computation” as OP is using it is about the level of granularity/abstraction at which consciousness is located, and I think it’s logically coherent to believe both (1) materialism[1] and (2) consciousness is located at a fundamental/non-abstract level.
To make a very unrealistic analogy that I think nonetheless makes the point: suppose you believed that all ball-and-disk integrators were conscious. Do you automatically believe that consciousness can be defined with a computation? Not necessarily—you could have a theory according to which a digital computer computing the same integrals is not consciousness (since, again, consciousness is about the fine-grained physical steps, rather than the abstracted computational steps, and a digital computer calculating ∫50x2dx performs very different physical steps than a ball-and-disk integrator doing the same). The only way you now care about “computation” is if you think “computation” does refer to low-level physical steps. In that case, your implication is correct, but this isn’t what OP means, and OP did define their terms.
In response to the two reactions:
Why do you say, “Besides, most people actually take the opposite approch: computation is the most “real” thing out there, and the universe—and any consciouses therein—arise from it.”
Euan McLean said at the top of his post he was assuming a materialist perspective. If you believe there exists “a map between the third-person properties of a physical system and whether or not it has phenomenal consciousness” you believe you can define consciousness with a computation. In fact, anytime you believe something can be explicitly defined and manipulated, you’ve invented a logic and computer. So, most people who take the materialist perspective believe the material world comes from a sort of “computational universe”, e.g. Tegmark IV.
Soldier mindset.
Here’s a soldier mindset: you’re wrong, and I’m much more confident on this than you are. This person’s thinking is very loosey-goosey and someone needed to point it out. His posts are mostly fluff with paradoxes and questions that would be completely answerable (or at least interesting) if he deleted half the paragraphs and tried to pin down definitions before running rampant with them.
Also, I think I can point to specific things that you might consider soldier mindset. For example,
If you actually want to know the answer: when you define the terms properly (i.e. KL-divergence from the firings that would have happened), the entire paradox goes away. I wasn’t giving him the answer, because his entire post is full of this same error: not defining his terms, running rampant with them, and then being shocked when things don’t make sense.
I reacted locally invalid (but didn’t downvote either comment) because I think “computation” as OP is using it is about the level of granularity/abstraction at which consciousness is located, and I think it’s logically coherent to believe both (1) materialism[1] and (2) consciousness is located at a fundamental/non-abstract level.
To make a very unrealistic analogy that I think nonetheless makes the point: suppose you believed that all ball-and-disk integrators were conscious. Do you automatically believe that consciousness can be defined with a computation? Not necessarily—you could have a theory according to which a digital computer computing the same integrals is not consciousness (since, again, consciousness is about the fine-grained physical steps, rather than the abstracted computational steps, and a digital computer calculating ∫50x2dx performs very different physical steps than a ball-and-disk integrator doing the same). The only way you now care about “computation” is if you think “computation” does refer to low-level physical steps. In that case, your implication is correct, but this isn’t what OP means, and OP did define their terms.
as OP defines the term; in my terminology, materialism means something different