On 5/1/2011 7:08 AM, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote:
I think that in this discussion one is assuming that the classical
picture of an OM applies and that then leads to the false notion that
you need to look at a sequence of states. But this is completely
false. Obviously the brain is effectively classical, but classicality
from quantum dynamics is only achived because of decoherence, so the
brain gets entangled with the environment. The same is true, of
course, if you run any classical machine, like your PC.
Now, the computational state of your brain, represented as an
entangled state with the environment, can be written in the suggestive
form:
sum over input of |input, corresponding output>
In fact, the entire computational history will be present in the
state, as it exist at any moment.
I don't see how that can be. Simply from an informational perspective,
the computational history can have a lot more bits than the digitized
brain can store as a state - at least as a classical system. I think
you must be including all the information that exists in the environment
due to interaction with the brain. This of course has been spreading
out from the brain at the speed of light; so it's not clear to me where
this history starts. With birth? At the big bang? At the last Everett
split? At the last Everett split that corresponds to a different
quasi-classical "thought??
Brent
This is why I think that in Bruno's program, which apart from the
technical details, involves deriving physics from the theory of
computation, one can jump to quantum mechanics much more
straightforwardly. Also, since decoherence happens in the position
bases, one should be able to derive space-time from first principles
as well. Simply put, if you have well defined computational states,
you should get quantum mechanics plus general relativity free of charge.
Saibal
Citeren Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>:
On 30 Apr 2011, at 09:09, meekerdb wrote:
On 4/29/2011 8:45 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 29 Apr 2011, at 02:42, Stephen Paul King wrote:
Please allow me to ask another question. Is the notion of an
“observer moment” corresponding to “the smallest possible
conscious experience” related to Bruno’s concept of substitution
level? ISTM that both act like the idea of a coarse graining on
an ensemble that is used to define the entropy of a system in
that all of the members of the ensemble that are
indistinguishable from a macroscopic point of view.
You can easily relate them.
Let us distinguish the 1-OMs from the 3-OMs. The 1-OM are
experiences of an individual when his brain is in some
computational state S.
I have reservations about this casual identification of "observer
moments" and "brain states". I can accept that a brain can
digitally simulated and hence be realized by a succession of
states. But I find it very doubtful that each state corresponds to
different "thought" or "observation" much less conscious "thoughts".
I was identifying the 3-OM with the brain state. The 1-OM, with
consciousness, are in Platonia, and are related with the whole
structure of the computations, notably through the measure space.
Locally we can still associate consciousness with some open interval,
but comp attaches consciousness (and matter) to something much more
sophisticated than a "sequence of states". It is the
counter-intuitive part of computationalism: the failure of the
identity thesis.
Such thoughts are slow things that unfold over time and must be
realized by many successive digital-brain states in terms of which
they overlap with other thoughts both temporally and spatially. So
digitizing brains doesn't imply that consciousness occurs in
discrete time slices.
You are completely right on this. I did simplify my talk a little bit
on purpose, so as not being too much technical. With comp we can
associate a consciousness to a third person event (like "my sleeping
friend"). But my friend's consciousness is realized only through an
infinity of number relations.
Bruno
Brent
We assume comp, of course, so we can attribute a 1-OM to some such
state. The 3-OMs are given by all the equivalent computational
states S, S', S'', ... obtained in the universal dovetailing. For
example the state of your brain emulated by a program computing the
Heisenberg evolution of the Milky Way at the level of strings, or
the state of your brain obtained by another program simulating the
quantum fluctuation of the void, or the state of your brain
obtained by a fortran program emulating a lisp program emulating a
prolog program emulating ... emulating the search of the solution
of some universal diophantine polynomial, etc. All those programs
are emulated by the universal dovetailer, and all the finite pieces
of computations obtained by such emulation can be proved to exist
in a tiny part of arithmetic. There are aleph_0 such finite piece
of computations, and they are all "run" by the UD. The first person
glue them into a priori 2^aleph_0 infinite computations.
For each of them, you can always find in arithmetic a computation
which is more fine grained. But you, by the first person
indeterminacy, cannot know in which computation you are. Actually
you can be said belonging to all of them, and your physical laws
are determined by the measure on your continuations of such
computations. From this you can see that the highest level of
substitution defines the measure on the possible lowest one, which
you cannot distinguish, by definition. That is why, if we look at
ourselves below that level, we have to be confronted with a strong
form of indeterminacy. Boltzman's idea cannot be used at this
stage, though, without having a measure on the relative
computations, and this prevents a direct use of the notion of
entropy. We need more physics for that, but, as I have already
explained we have to derive that physics from the numbers and self-
reference if we don't want to miss the relationship between the
quanta and the qualia offered by the splitting between provable
self-reference and true self-reference (G and G* and their
intensional variants).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-
l...@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 .
--
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 .
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
--
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.
