Unless someone expects "consciousness" to leak in from the cosmic foam, I am
guessing there is nothing intrinsic in the quantum (aside from wave-function)
that possesses a 'consciousness,' possibility. Moreover the other two
possibilities for hypercomputing, can come from two other technologies. One id
the Stanford developed photonic computing, and the other is various work being
done with chunks of dna. I am guessing complexity brings consciousness. Would a
boltzmann brain be a conscious observer? Only if it was complex enough.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>
To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Jun 21, 2017 7:31 pm
Subject: Re: “Could a Quantum Computer Have Subjective Experience?”
On 22/06/2017 1:44 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> On 21 Jun 2017, at 08:21, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>> On 21/06/2017 4:03 pm, Russell Standish wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 12:15:31PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>>>> On 19/06/2017 10:23 am, Russell Standish wrote:
>>>>> I know Scott wouldn't go as far as me. For me, all such irreversible
>>>>> processes are related to conscious entities in some way. Whilst
>>>>> agreeing that Geiger counters are unlikely to be conscious, I would
>>>>> say that the output of Geiger counter is not actually discrete until
>>>>> observed by a conscious experimenter.
>>>> That sounds remarkably like the "many minds" interpretation of
>>>> quantum mechanics. This is disfavoured by most scientists because it
>>>> leaves the physics of the billions of years before the emergence of
>>>> the first "conscious" creature unresolved -- the first consciousness
>>>> would cause an almighty collapse on the many minds reading.
>>>>
>>> Each consciousness causes "an almighty collapse" in er own mind
>>> independently of any other. It's a pure 1p phenomena.
>>
>> It is actually a 3p phenomenon because there is inter-subjective
>> agreement about the fact that measurements give definite results.
>
> Inter-subjectivity does not imply 3p, as it can be "only" 1p plural.
> Let me illustrate this with a variant of the WM duplication.
>
> Imagine that Bruce and John are undergoing the WM-duplication *together*.
>
> By this I mean they both enter the scanning-annihilating box, and are
> both reconstituted in Washington and in Moscow.
>
> And let us assume they do it repetitively, which means they come back
> to Helsinki, and do it again together.
>
> Obviously, the line-life past that each copies describes in its
> personal diaries grows like H followed by a sequence of W and M. The
> number of copies grows exponentially (2^n). After ten iterations, we
> have 2^10 = 1024 individuals, who share an indeterminate experiences.
> With minor exceptions, they all agree that the experience has always
> given each times a precise outcome, always belonging to {W, M}.
> Importantly the duplicated couples agreed (which was the Washington
> or Moscow outcome) in all duplication. They mostly all agreed they did
> not found any obvious algorithm to predict the sequence (the exception
> might concerned the guys in nameable stories, like:
>
> WWWWWWWWWW
>
> MMMMMMMMMM
>
> Or the development of some remarkable real number in binary, like the
> binary expansion of PI, sqrt(2), sqr(n), etc. In this case, the
> computable is made rare (and more and more negligible when n grows,
> those histories are "white rabbits histories").
>
> That is what I mean by first person plural. It concerns population of
> machine sharing self-multiplication. it is interesting to compare the
> quantum linear self-superposition with the purely arithmetical one.
Sure, that would seem to be reasonably described as 1p-plural. except
that there is no need to have two people enter the duplicating machine
and undergo different teleportations afterwards. Surely it is sufficient
to consider one person doing a series of polarization measurements on a
sequence of photons from an unpolarized source. That person will record
some sequence of '+' and '-' results. If the experiment is repeated N
times, there will be 2^N sequences, one in each of the generated worlds.
But that has nothing to do with inter-subjective agreement between
different observers. To see that, consider just one polarization
measurement: In order for it to be said that the measurement gave a
result, there has to be decoherence and the formation of irreversible
records. I think it is Zurek who talks about multiple copies of the
result entangled with the environment. So many different individuals can
observe the result of this single experiment, and they will all agree
that the result was what the experimenter wrote in her lab book. That is
inter-subjective agreement. It clearly has nothing to do with 1p, or
1p-plural pictures. But it is precisely that inter-subjective agreement
that is essential for physics -- people have to agree that experiments
have definite results, and they have to agree what those results are.
Inter-subjective agreement occurs in just one world -- although there
may be similar agreements between copies of those people entangled be
decoherence with the other possible experimental results. Each world is
then characterized by inter-subjective agreement about the result
obtained in that world.
Again, this bears no relation to Tegmark's 'bird' view. You might well
call the bird view the 0p view, because there is no person or
consciousness that can ever experience that view.
>>> There is no collapse at all at the 3p level, nor even decoherence as
>>> such.
>>
>> Decoherence is a well-understood physical phenomenon that has been
>> widely observed.
>
> I can't agree more. It might be, and should be when assuming digital
> mechanism, a first person plurality phenomenon. In the (quantum) MW,
> is the fission/differentiation of histories brought by measurement,
> and the measurement itself is part of the histories.
As I have just explained at length, decoherence is not a 1p-plural view
-- it is quite definitely a matter of entanglement in a single world
giving rise to inter-subjective agreement on the results of any
particular experiment.
Each 'world' in the many worlds picture is a separate decoherent history.
>> I do not know what you mean by saying "nor even decoherence as such."
>
> Maybe Russell meant in the (3-1) view of the (assumed by Everett)
> Universal wave. Plausible. The universal wave describes a change of
> base. It is God's vision (in this still physicalist view).
>
> Everett, that is QM without the collapse axiom, looks already like a
> solution of the computationalist mind-body problem. But it works only
> if Everett QM is itself derivable from (intensional) arithmetic.
In that case you shouldn't be making pronouncements about what the
physics means until you have completed that derivation from arithmetic.
>> Also, you seem to be confusing the inter-subjective 3p view with
>> Tegmark's bird view. There is no person, body, or consciousness that
>> ever has the bird view -- the bird is a purely formal construct and
>> has nothing to do with mind or consciousness.
>
> That is an interesting remark, but it is a highly debatable question.
> See my conversation with David Nyman, about the "the nature" of the 0p
> view: is it more 1p or 3p? Is it more like a thing or a person? Well,
> I don't know. Is the arithmetical reality conceivable as a person? You
> can see it has an infinite (and highly non mechanical) body of
> (arithmetical) knowledge, but this would be a poetical acknowledgment
> of our ignorance.
I can accept the characterization of the bird view as 0p -- but since it
is not experienced by anyone or anything, then it is neither 1p, 3p, nor
1p-plural.
>> Even though everything might remain unitary at that level, no one can
>> ever experience the consequences of that unitary evolution.
>
> Hmm... You speculate that there is no global 1p for the global unitary
> evolution, which is an open problem to me. Hard to know.
Well, you can speculated about panpsychism if you wish, but since it
would have no observable consequences, the notion seems otiose to me.
> Nevertheless, assuming QM, you do *experience* the *consequences* of
> the unitary evolution, right here and right now, directly, and
> indirectly, as you are using a machine whose miniaturization has been
> made possible by the QM laws + human inference of the QM laws.
Unitary evolution is a property of the equations, not of the
experiences. It is only ever inferred, not observed directly. The
universal wave of the multiverse is 0p -- there is no one or thing that
ever experiences the assumed unitary evolution of the universal wave,
The fact that QM describes many aspects of experience does not prove
unitarity, because we interact with quantum mechanical phenomena only at
the 'classical' level, after decoherence and FAPP collapse. Our
experience is, in fact, entirely of non-unitary behaviour -- experiments
give unique results, not superpositions in the measurement basis.
Bruce
>
> With mechanism, the QM laws have to be derived from the first person
> views emulated in elementary number theory, or from any first order
> Church-Turing-Post -Kleene equivalent theory.
>
> Bruno
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