On 3/8/2011 6:21 AM, 1Z wrote:
Up to a point. But if the faking deviated very far from perceptions of
> this world the BIV would no longer be able to process them. We casually
> talk of "white rabbits" on this list, which are perfectly understandable
> things and are really of this world (e.g. in Walt Disney pictures). But
> they are just tiny derivative, deviations from reality. Even things as
> real as optical illusions become difficult to process (which is why they
> produce illusions). If your BIV was a human brain and was provided the
> perceptions of, say, a bird it would probably be unable to process them
> - it would be as cut off as if you provided white noise. My point is
> that human brains evolve and learn in this world and it's the only kind
> of world they can be conscious of. You can fiddle a little with inputs
> to the BIV, but unless your inputs are just variants on this world,
> they'll mean nothing.
>
> Brent
I think you can have gorss deviations from physics that are perfectly
easy to process
perceptually. In fact that is quite common in movie FX, games etc.
There is no
problem seeing a hovering rock.
We're using very different ideas of "gross deviations". I'd say a
hovering rock is just a variation of this world: a variation that allows
us to identify the rock and hovering. Such variations certainly can
create the "white rabbit" problem, since the number of worlds like ours
but with variation effectively infinite. But when you consider all
possible inputs to the BIV it is a set of much greater cardinality. It
consists of inputs that the BIV won't be able to process because they
won't correspond to objects and relations. Just to make up a silly
example, suppose I Fourier transform all the normal perceptual signals
and then pass them to the BIV. The information is preserved, the
physics is preserved, but the BIV won't be able to make anything of it.
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
