On 28 Jan 2011, at 18:48, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 1/27/2011 8:34 PM, Rex Allen wrote:
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 4:12 PM, Brent Meeker<meeke...@dslextreme.com> wrote:

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.

I would have thought that dreams would be a pretty clear
counter-example to the claim that consciousness requires a world to
interact with...?


Do you think you could have dreams if you had never interacted with the world?


There are evidences (REM) that mammal fetus does dream.
Do you agree that DM implies that possibility.
In practice most of our consciousness grounding heavily relies on the most probable worlds arising from long deep (linear) computations. Apes fetus can dream climbing trees but they do that with ancestors climbing the most probable trees of their most probable neighborhoods since a long period. With classical mechanism, I would say, that to know is to believe p when "luckily" p is true, and to be awaken is to be dreaming of a world when "luckily" the world is real. But real means here first person sharable, and may result from its stability on random oracles.



On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 7:58 PM, Brent Meeker<meeke...@dslextreme.com> wrote:

I think the whole world probably is Turing emulable, but then that does not get rid of materialism. Material just becomes one of the things emulated
along with consciousness.

But then the material world we observe doesn't cause our
consciousness.  Rather, the underlying emulation substrate (which we
have no access to) causes both the material world and consciousness.


That's possible, or it may be that the emulatated matter causes the emulated consciousness; in which case we have the same questions about consciousness we had before assuming the world is an emulation.

Brent

For instance, it would not be the case that neurons cause
consciousness...neurons wouldn't be an extra layer that existed
between us and the emulation substrate.

What exists would be the emulation substrate, going about it's
business of existing.  As a (presumably) accidental side-effect of
that existence, there would be us with our experience of the world.

But, given the example of dreams - which aren't "of" anything external
to us (again, presumably) - why assume that there actually is a world
beyond our experience .

Perhaps the emulation substrate produces nothing but dreams?

Would there be any reason to predict that such an emulation substrate
would be governed by principles that we could comprehend?  How would
it be different from the Kantian noumenal realm?



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