Quentin Anciaux wrote:
Le mercredi 06 janvier 2010 à 00:29 +1100, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
2010/1/5 Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com>:
Consider a set of three one minute intervals of experience, {S1, S2,
S3}, which belong to a person S. S2 remembers S1 and remembers no gap
or intervening experiences between S2 and S1; S3 remembers S1 and S2
and remembers that S1 preceded S2; and S3 also remembers no gap or
intervening experiences between S2 and S1 or between S3 and S2. In
other words, they are subjectively three consecutive minutes in the
life of S. S is aware that his experiences are generated on a
computer, and he is also aware that they are being generated in one of
two ways: in sequence as S1, S2, S3 or out of sequence as S2, S1, S3.
Does S have any basis for deciding that it is more likely that his
experiences are being generated in sequence?
It seems to me that it depends if the computation is iterative or not... in
other words, to compute step N you must have computed step N-1 before that.
If you can directly compute step N without computing prior step, S2/S1/S3 is
possible. If not you had necessarily computed step S1 before S2, only by
doing a replay of a previously done computation you could do it :
- first generate S1/S2/S3 in order and save each intermediate result, then
you can do
- S2 (taking the previously intermediate result of S1), S1 then S3 (taking
S2 result).
But running the same thing more times add a priori nothing. If the process
is iterative then "in order" computation win the measure battle (because any
out of order one require a genuine in order computation before).
Another way to compute S2 without using S1 would be to run the UD.
Yes but the UD will generate infinitely more often the in order S1/S2/S3
than out of order... with what you are saying I don't even understand
what is a computation if not a rules ordered sequential state order.
Quentin
It seems strange that we start with the hypothesis that consciousness is
a kind of computation - a sequential processing of information - and
then arrive at picture in which there is no processing and sequence is
just inferred. On the one hand consciousness is a process, on the other
hand it is static state. I suspect there is something wrong with the
slicing of the stream of consciousness into zero-duration,
non-overlapping states. I can see that states can encode information
that, when coarse grained, define a sequence of increasing entropy, but
is it legitimate to identify having the information "in memory" with
"remembering"?
Brent
Brent
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