MGA 2
The second step of the MGA, consists in making a change to MGA 1 so that we don't have to introduce that unreasonable amount of cosmic luck, or of apparent randomness. It shows the "lucky" aspect of the coming information is not relevant. Jason thought on this sequel. Let us consider again Alice, which, as you know as an artificial brain, made of logic gates. Now Alice is sleeping, and doing a dream---like Carroll's original Alice. Today we know that a REM dream is a conscious experience, or better an experience of consciousness, thanks to the work of Hearne Laberge, Dement, etc. Malcolm's theory of dream, where dream are not conscious, has been properly refuted by Hearne and Laberge experiences. (All reference can be found in the bibliography of my "long thesis". Ask me if you have problem to find them. I am using a dream experience instead of an experience of awakeness for having less technical problems and being shorter on the relevant points. I let you do the change as an exercise if you want. If you have understood UDA up to the sixth step, such change are easy to do. To convince Brent Meeker, you will have to put the environment, actually its digital functional part in the "generalized brain", making the general setting much longer to describe. (If the part of the environment needed for consciousness to proceed is not Turing emulable, then you already negate MEC of course). The dream will facilitate the experience. It is known that in a REM dream we are paralyzed (no outputs), we are cut out from the environment: (no inputs, well not completely because you would not hear the awakening clock, but let us not care about this, or do the exercise above), ... and we are hallucinating: the dream is a natural sort of video game. It shows that the brain is at least a "natural" virtual reality generator. OK? Alice has already an artificial digital brain. This consists in a boolean tridimensional graph with nodes being NOR gates, and vertex being wires. For the MEC+MAT believer, the dream is produced by the physical activity of the "circular digital information processing" done by that boolean graph. With MEC, obviously all what matter is that the boolean graph processes the right computation, and we don't have to take into account the precise position of the gates in space. They are not relevant for the computation (if things like that were relevant we would already have said "no" to the doctor. So we can topologically deform Alice boolean graph brain and project it on a plane so that no gates overlap. Some wires will cross, but (exercise) the crossing of the wires function can itself be implemented with NOR gates. (A solution of that problem, posed by Dewdney, has been given in the Scientific American Journal (and is displayed in "Conscience et Mécanisme" with the reference). So Alice's brain can be made into a plane boolean graph. Also, a MEC+MAT believer should not insist on the electrical nature of the communication by wires, nor on the electrical nature of the processing of the information by the gates, so that we can use optical information instead. Laser beams play the role of the wires, and some destructive interference can be used for the NOR. The details are not relevant, given that I am not presenting a realist experiment (below, or later, if people harass me with too much engineering question, I will propose a completely different representation of the same (with respect to the relevance of the reasoning) situation, by using the even less realist Ned Block Chinese People Computer: it can be used for making clear no magic is used in what follows, with the price that its overall implementation is very unrealist, given that the neurons are the chinese willingly playing that role. So, now, we put Alice's brain, which has become a two dimensional optical boolean graph, in between two planes of transparent solid material, glass, and we add a sort of "clever" fluid cristal together with the graph,in between the glass plates. The fluid cristal is supposed to have the following peculiar property (which certainly is hard to implement concretely but which is possible in principle). Each time a beam of light trigs a line between two nodes, it trigs a laser beam in the "good" direction between the two optical gates, with the correct frequency-color (to keep right the functioning of the NOR). This works well, and we can let that brain work from time t1 to t2, where Alice dreams specifically, for fixing the matter, that she is in front of a mushroom, talking with a caterpillar who sits on the Muschroom (all right?). We have beforehand save the instantaneous state corresponding to the begining of that dream, so as to be able to repeat that precise graph activity. Each time we allow the graph doing the computation corresponding to the dream (which exists by MEC), the believer in MAT, who believes in the physical supervenience thesis, has to admit Alice is conscious, in the sense of having the experience of consciousness of her (non lucid) dream: she feels herself talking with a caterpillar for example. Now we film that active graph, with a high resolution camera. As you have most probably already guess, that film constitutes our home made "lucky cosmic explosion" generator, corresponding to Alice's dream experience. So let us suppose that poor Alice got, again, a not very good optical plane graph, so that some (1 to many to all, again) NOR gates break down, in that precise computation corresponding to her dream experience. And let us project, in real time, with the correct scaling, the movie we have made, on the graph, playing its role of a repeatable lucky rays generator. If Alice remains conscious in MGA 1, through MEC and MAT, Alice remains conscious in this setting too, all right? In the ALL gates broken case, we have really, *only a movie* of Alice's brain activity. Does consciousness arise from the projection of that movie? Should a believer in MEC+MAT believes that? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
