[SEQ RERUN] Against Modal Logics

If the world is built from computation rather than causal arrows, how do you get to causal arrows?

I had to do a bit of searching, but it seems that Eliezer (or at least Eliezer_2008) considers causal arrows to be more fundamental than computations:

And, if we have "therefore" back, if we have "cause" and "effect" back—and science would be somewhat forlorn without them—then we can hope to retrieve the concept of "computation". We are not forced to grind up reality into disconnected configurations; there can be glue between them. We can require the amplitude relations between connected volumes of configuration space, to carry out some kind of timeless computation, before we decide that it contains the timeless Now of a conscious mind.

So here's my understanding of Eliezer_2008's guess of how all the reductions would work out: mind reduces to computation which reduces to causal arrows which reduces to some sort of similarity relationship between configurations, and the universe fundamentally is a (timeless) set of configurations and their amplitudes.

Interestingly, Pearl himself doesn't seem nearly as ambitious about how far to push the reduction of "causality" and explains that his theory

takes the physical notions of “mechanisms”, “variables”, “measurements” and “interventions” as the basic primitives.

which bears almost no resemblance to Eliezer's idea of reducing causality to similarity.

It certainly has been resolved. At least to the degree that anyone with a lick of sense can look at the pro-zombie arguments and say 'that is blatantly unphysical nonsense.' We can talk about consciousness. The atoms that make up my fingers can interact with the atoms that make up my nervous system, which can in turn, brain, etc, etc, and this unbroken causal chain make me talk about feeling conscious inside, which I do. We may not know how it works computationally, but we do know that it's something in the brain that's doing it. Or, at least, something is making us talk about consciousness. It is possible, I suppose, that the thing that makes us conscious is different from the thing that makes us talk about consciousness -- but there's certainly no evidence for it, and it's a damned silly idea in any case. So, as far as the naive 'zombies physically identical to humans' goes, if you don't consider the idea shot down, decapitated, plucked, gutted, and served for Christmas dinner, then that tells you more about the flaws in your criteria for drawing a conclusion than anything else.

There are some related questions worth exploring - like, for instance, once we figure out how consciousness works on a mechanical level, we can answer the question of whether or not it's possible to build a piece of software that reasonably impersonates a human being without having subjective experience. That's an interesting question. But the classical philosophical zombies are, frankly, stupid.