It's like saying that things fall "because of gravity".
But that's precisely what we say. Things fall "because this equation describes how they fall" (math just allows for a more precise description than natural languages). All we do is find good (first priority: accurate, second priority: short) descriptions, which is just "this does that". Fundamentally, a law of gravity and a law of "souls do consciousness" are the same thing, except the first is actually useful and can be "cashed out" better. Consider F=ma were a base-level description. How is "because F=ma" any more of an explanation than "because souls do consciousness" (of course disregarding practicalities such as predictive value etc., I'm only concerned with "status as an explanation")?
A model-builder so computationally unlimited as to make any finite computation in epsilon time is too magical to make a useful thought experiment.
Well, you can reject Omega-type thought experiments with the same reasoning. Also, Turing Machines.
I'm surprised that "There is only the base level, everything else is a computational hack used by model-builders." is considered to be controversial. I don't mean it as "the referents of the abstractions us model-builders use don't exist", just as "'the wave' is just a label, the referent of which isn't some self-evident basic unit; the concept is just a short-hand which is good enough for our daily-life purposes". Think of it this way: Would two supremely powerful model-builders come up with "chair", independently? If there's reason to answer "no", then chair is just a label useful to some model-builders, as opposed to something fundamental to the territory.
It's like saying that things fall "because of gravity".
But that's precisely what we say. Things fall "because this equation describes how they fall" (math just allows for a more precise description than natural languages).
"This equation describes how they fall" is a sensible thing to say. "Because of gravity" is only sensible if it refers to that mathematics. The usage I intended to refer to is when someone says that who doesn't know the mathematics and is therefore not referring to it -- a member of the genera...
I've read a fair amount on Less Wrong and can't recall much said about the plausibility of some sort of afterlife. What do you guys think about it? Is there some sort of consensus?
Here's my take:
Edit: People in the comments have just taken it as a given that consciousness resides solely in the brain without explaining why they think this. My point in this post is that I don't see why we have reason to reject the 3 possibilities above. If you reject the idea that consciousness could reside outside of the brain, please explain why.