[ExI] Mindless Thought Experiments

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 02/03/2008, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:

> We have hashed that out so many times years and so many years
>  ago. I suppose I'm proud to have been on the cutting edge
>  so very long ago. Jason's comments and questions are really
>  very, very old stuff here.
>
>  As far as I know, the Extropian list, and then later Wei Dai's list and
>  SL4, were the first forums in which all this was debated at length and
>  at a very high level.

Hilary Putnam discussed this idea in his 1988 book "Representation and Reality".

>  Now, of course, this is not to mean to say that all these very complex
>  questions have been totally resolved.  They haven't, and they won't be
>  for a long time. Someday, even if it were thousands of years from now,
>  barring catastrophe or collapse, uploaded entities who run however
>  many copies of themselves whenever they want, and who have long
>  ago left biological substrates, will no doubt consider these questions
>  resolved.  Meanwhile, what we have done is to practice thinking about
>  what their answers will be.

One possible answer could be that it's true and it isn't incompatible
with functionalism.

Let me define another philosophical position: Addition Functionalism.
This is the theory that addition is multiply realisable, on widely
varying substrates. Thus, addition can be implemented on your fingers,
in your head, on an abacus, and so on. It is also being implemented by
accident in any arbitrary physical system with enough complexity, even
though no-one is around to recognise it. But this is absurd; so either
Addition Functionalism is false, or some rule must be added to stop
the accidental implementations. Right?



-- 
Stathis Papaioannou