How would his formulating equations give me any evidence that he feels the shift in the gravitational constant? Newton's laws weren't evidence that Newton ever experienced orbiting another body.
Newton did orbit the sun, while riding the Earth; and his laws were certainly evidence for that rather than against it.
Saying that event A is zero evidence for event B, really means that the two events are completely uncorrelated with each other -- do you really mean to argue that the existence of Newton's equations is completely uncorrelated with the fact Newton lived in a (to the limits of his understanding) Newtonian universe?
Look, back to the basic point of the sterility of qualia, how would you go about distinguishing whether I actually experience qualia, or whether I am just programmed by evolution to mimic the responses of other people when asked about their experiences of qualia?
Occam's razor can be useful there, I think, until we have enough understanding of neuroscience to be able to tell between a brain doing mimicry, and a brain doing an honest and lucid self-evaluation.
Newton did orbit the sun, while riding the Earth
And he had no particular qualia that would distinguish that from any of a billion other arrangements.
do you really mean to argue that the existence of Newton's equations is completely uncorrelated with the fact Newton lived in a (to the limits of his understanding) Newtonian universe?
No, I mean to argue that the existence of Newton's equations is completely uncorrelated with whether Newton experienced any qualia. A properly-designed curve-fitting algorithm, given the right data, could produce them as ...
This post is a followup to "We are not living in a simulation" and intended to help me (and you) better understand the claims of those who took a computationalist position in that thread. The questions below are aimed at you if you think the following statement both a) makes sense, and b) is true:
"Consciousness is really just computation"
I've made it no secret that I think this statement is hogwash, but I've done my best to make these questions as non-leading as possible: you should be able to answer them without having to dismantle them first. Of course, I could be wrong, and "the question is confused" is always a valid answer. So is "I don't know".
a) Something that an abstract machine does, as in "No oracle Turing machine can compute a decision to its own halting problem"?
b) Something that a concrete machine does, as in "My calculator computed 2+2"?
c) Or, is this distinction nonsensical or irrelevant?
ETA: By the way, I probably won't engage right away with individual commenters on this thread except to answer requests for clarification. In a few days I'll write another post analyzing the points that are brought up.