Dear Mark,
I have questions to pose to you.
1) What is the cardinality of this infinite collection/set/class/whatever of
machines?
2) What measure is it that might be used to partition the set or class of
machines such that at least one subset of them can be identified as
corresponding to consciousness?
3) How can we differentiate between Machines and not-Machines unless there
exists some measure to do so?
4) How does mere existence of a Machine give any accounting for its
implementation?
5) Are you secretly attempting to construct a reductio ad absurdum proof?
Kindest regards,
Stephen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Buda" <her...@acm.org>
To: "Everything List" <everything-list@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 2:55 PM
Subject: Re: the theory of everything
snip
But the abstract immaterial computations are all that there is. There
is no machine, no physical universe, no nothing, without the
computations - the consciousnesses. And all of them "happen", and all
of them are equally real. Each of them is like the execution of a
universal Turing machine given a particular input tape. The initial
portion of the tape encodes some algorithm executed by the machine;
the rest of the tape serves as input to the machine (observations, in
the quantum mechanical sense).
Some (infinite) subset of these machines correspond to consciousnesses
that believe they are you. I am asserting that they, in fact, *are*
you. The first-person you, including your mind, body, and the entire
observable universe (as seen by you). That's why you can say "yes,
Doctor" and still continue - your consciousness was never really in
your body in the first place. Learning that as an infant was one of
the first mistakes you made, and one of the hardest to unlearn, but it
was necessary for you to be able to learn all the other stuff, the
important stuff, most of which you have yet to learn.
snip
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