On 28 Jan 2011, at 01:58, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 1/27/2011 2:23 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 27 Jan 2011, at 22:12, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 1/27/2011 10:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Jan 2011, at 15:47, Stephen Paul King wrote:
<snip>
Mathematical structures do not “do” anything, they merely
exist, if at all! We can use verbs to describe relations between
nouns but that does not change the fact that nouns are nouns and
not verbs. The movie graph is a neat trick in that is abstracts
out the active process of organizing the information content of
the individual frames and the order of their placement in the
graph, but that some process had to be involved to perform the
computation of the content and ordering cannot be removed, it is
only pushed out of the field of view. This is why I argue that
we cannot ignore the computational complexity problem that exist
in any situation where we are considering a optimal
configuration that is somehow selected from some set or ensemble.
I don't see how this would change anything in the argument,
unless you presuppose consciousness is not locally Turing
emulable, to start with.
What does "locally" mean in this context? I doubt that
consciousness is strictly local in the physical sense; it requires
and world to interact with.
It means that, when saying yes to the doctor, you will not only
survive, but you will feel the same physical laws.
Saying yes to the doctor who proposes to replace my brain with a
digital computer still leaves my body and the rest of the world non-
digital and non-local.
Yes. Be it the physical world or the "real" platonic reality.
You will not change the relative measure on your computations. It
might be necessary to duplicate a part of the environment, which,
in that case has to be supposed to be Turing emulable in that same
sense.
But this seems to me dubious. All known theories of physics assume
a continuum of space, time, and probability. Many people think
these may be approximations to a finer, discrete structure, but so
far as I know there have not been any successful theories showing
how these discrete structures could emulate the continuum. You may
object that the part of the environment needed in a simulation of my
consciousness is quite small and so can easily be emulated by a
discrete computation. But that is only the case when my brain+other
is treated as not entangled with the rest of the universe. If this
entanglement (including the whole universe) is emulated then as in
Bohmian or Everett's quantum mechanics, the world is deterministic
and at some level of precision Turing emulable. But if the
emulation attempts to be local then it must include inherent
randomness - which I think is not Turing computable. So I think
there is a tension here that is obfuscated by thinking of the doctor
just replacing your brain or a part of your brain and helping
yourself to the rest of the world. Your brain is entangled with the
rest of the world and either you need to leave the rest of the world
in place so your Turing emulation can be entangled (non-local), or
you need to emulate the whole world.
Only in the particular case where your 'generalized brain" is a
quantum computer. It makes the substitution level very low, but
quantum computer are Turing emulable and their executions are
generated by universal dovetailing, so this will not change the
reasoning. To get the quanta+qualia with the G/G splitting, we still
have to justify why a quantum computer win the "measure" competition,
in that case.
Perhaps I miss your point. Please elaborate if that is the case.
I think the whole world probably is Turing emulable,
I doubt this. I have no doubt the 'whole reality' is not Turing
emulable. For the physical reality this is an open question (in the
comp theory).
but then that does not get rid of materialism. Material just
becomes one of the things emulated along with consciousness.
In that case of a very low level, yes. The more the level is low, the
more MEC looks like materialism is true. But in all cases, matter is a
measure on infinities of infinite computations. The situation is made
complex due to the fact that the UD can simulate matter, despite it
can never emulate it. Actually, when I dig on this I can have the
feeling that comp predicts that the physical universe is infinite and
self-similar in all possible 'directions', but I have never really
developed this. The comp-physics has too many open problems to figure
out the general shape of the physical reality of course. It is not the
goal. The goal of comp is to get a coherent account of both qualia and
quanta, or at least a coherent formulation of the mind-body problem.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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