Bruno Marchal wrote: > 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
I think yes. Although one might quibble about the "arise" part. The specific pattern, which was not generated but merely copied by the movie, arose from Alice's life experience - with mushrooms, caterpillars, etc. It's meaning/interpretation comes from the external world. Brent --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
