On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 09:04:26PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > Is there any reason to believe that we would lose consciousness, or notice > that anything strange had happened at all, if most or all of the parallel > branches > in the multiverse suddenly vanished? >
I think this question is ill-posed, but I'll try to answer another question that may have some bearing on what your trying to get at. The Game of Life is known to be Turing complete. However, I do not think any arrangement of dots in GoL could be conscious. Rather there is an arrangement that implements a universal dovetailer. The UD is quite possibly enough to emulate the full Multiverse (this is sort of where Bruno's partail results are pointing), which we know contain conscious processes. This is what I believe Maudlin's argument is telling us. So am I computationalist? On the most obvious level, no. However, considering the above perhaps I am Bruno's sort of computationalist with a very deep level of replacement (ie switching entire realities). Confused? That would make two of us. Cheers -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics 0425 253119 (") UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---