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Template:Causal intervention and symbolic language: Difference between revisions
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Template:Causal intervention and symbolic language (view source)
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Living things — biological organisms, but also [[cellular automaton|cellular automata]] etc. — necessarily have encoded into them a set of “instructions” for their own replication: this is an operating condition of replicating: the organism functions like a [[Turing machine]]. | Living things — biological organisms, but also [[cellular automaton|cellular automata]] etc. — necessarily have encoded into them a set of “instructions” for their own replication: this is an operating condition of replicating: the organism functions like a [[Turing machine]]. | ||
The physical [[substrate]] in which the information is encoded is not materially important to the replication process, only ''symbolically'' so. The instructions themselves are “[[Substrate|substrate neutral]]”: you could encode them in DNA, cells, ticker tape or code. You could build a Turing machine out of transistors, vacuum tubes, or ten ton concrete blocks, each would take wildly different amounts of more energy to process the same simple string, and all vastly more than would a Pentium processor. ''But the symbolic meaning of the string inside the Turing machine would be the same''. | The physical [[substrate]] in which the information is encoded is not materially important to the replication process, only ''symbolically'' so. The instructions themselves are “[[Substrate|substrate neutral]]”: you could encode them in DNA, cells, ticker tape or code. You could build a Turing machine out of transistors, vacuum tubes, or ten-ton concrete blocks, each would take wildly different amounts of more energy to process the same simple string, and all vastly more than would a Pentium processor. ''But the symbolic meaning of the string inside the Turing machine would be the same''. | ||
Now, [[philosophy]] nuts: recall from your ''God, Mind and Free Will'' intro lectures the materialist “clincher” that proved consciousness must be wholly material: ''there is no evidence for non-material causal interventions in the physical world''. If there were, there would be some kind of injection or leakage of energy into the physical system. But there is not: energy is conserved. A non-material consciousness to would invalidate the laws of thermodynamics: non-material consciousness breaks rules of thermodynamics, in other words. Game over. | Now, [[philosophy]] nuts: recall from your ''God, Mind and Free Will'' intro lectures the materialist “clincher” that proved consciousness must be wholly material: ''there is no evidence for non-material causal interventions in the physical world''. If there were, there would be some kind of injection or leakage of energy into the physical system. But there is not: energy is conserved. A non-material consciousness to would invalidate the laws of thermodynamics: non-material consciousness breaks rules of thermodynamics, in other words. Game over. | ||