On Nov 30, 2008, at 9:53 AM, Günther Greindl wrote: > Kory wrote: > >> I have an intuition that causality >> (or its logical equivalent in Platonia) is somehow important for >> consciousness. You argue that the the slide from Fully-Functional >> Alice to Lucky Alice (or Fully-Functional Firefox to Lucky Firefox) >> indicates that there's something wrong with this idea. However, you >> have an intuition that order is somehow important for consciousness. > > But we must realise that causality is a concept that is deeply related > (cognitively, in humans) to time and physical change. > > But both time and space _emerge_ only from the inside view (1st person > or 1st person shareable) in the sum over all computations. > > In Platonia (viewed, for the time being, ludicrously and impossibly, > from the outside) - there is no notion of time, space, sequentiality, > before and after. > > The very notion of causation must be one that arises only in the > inside > view, as a "succession" of consistent patterns.
For what it's worth, I do think that that there's a *kind* of causality in Platonia. Let me once again trot out the picture of a platonic block universe in which the initial state is the binary digits of PI, and the succeeding states are determined by the rules of Conway's Life. This block universe exists unchangingly and eternally in Platonia, but the states of the bits within it are related in a kind of causal fashion. The state of each bit in the block is determined (in a sense, "caused") by the pyramid of cells beneath it, stretching back to the initial state, which is determined by the algorithm for computing the binary digits of PI. In this sense, causality is an essential aspect of the platonic notion of computation. One might argue that this is really a misuse of the concept of "causality" - that I should just talk about the necessary logical relationships that are there "by definition" in my platonic object. But my point is that these logical relationships fill the exact role that "causality" is supposed to fill for the physicalist. When patterns of bits within this platonic block universe "discuss" their own physics, they might talk about how current configurations of physical matter were "caused" by previous states. The logical connections in Platonia are a good candidate for what they can actually be talking about. This platonic form of "causality" may not always be directly related to the concept of time that patterns of bits in a block universe might have. For instance, there's a cellular automaton rule (which deserves to be much more widely known than it is) called Critters which is as simple as Conway's Life, uses only bits (on or off), is known to be computation universal, and is also fully reversible. This gets weird, because the computational structures within a Critters block universe will still seem to favor one direction in time - they'll store memories about the "past" and try to anticipate the "future", etc. But in fact, our own physics seems to be reversible, so we have these same issues to work out regarding our own consciousness. The point is that, within a Critters block universe in Platonia, the states will still be logically related to each other in a way that precisely matches what physicists in the block universe (the "critters within Critters"!) would think of as causality. -- Kory --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
