On 29 Sep 2011, at 21:28, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/29/2011 11:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 29 Sep 2011, at 19:24, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/29/2011 6:12 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Jason
Resch<[email protected]> wrote:
If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness,
then you can
know you were not created 1 microsecond ago.
Suppose your brain paused for 1 us every 99 ms. To an external
observer you would be functioning normally; do you think you
would be
a philosophical zombie? We can change the thought experiment to
make
the pauses and the duration of consciousness between the pauses
arbitrarily long, effectively cutting up consciousness however we
want, even if a conscious moment is smeared out over time.
That's true, regarding the brain as a classical computer or as an
abstract computation. But those are the points in question. I
doubt that it is true regarding the brain as the quantum object it
is. It's not clear to me what it would mean in the QM case;
"freezing the wave function"?
Use the quantum Zeno effect. Observe its state repetitively. You
will project it again and again in its original state. That is one
method.
That requires constructing an observable that has brain states as
its eigenstates. Such an observable is a quasi-classical
interaction that entangles the state with the environment via
decoherence. So whether consciousness would survive this, is
already equivalent to the question of whether you should say 'yes'
to the doctor who proposes to replace your brain with a classical
computation.
That makes my point. Note I was not serious about using that Quantum
Zeno effect for freezing an object like a brain.
Or, second method, emulate the quantum object evolution on a
classical computer, and freeze the classical computer.
Does the classical computer obey the 323 principle?
Assuming comp, consciousness supervene on the abstract relationship,
not on any particular instantiation/emulation.
I think such computers don't exist (except in Platonia).
But assuming comp, "Earth" ("non-platonia") is an illusion of numbers
living in Platonia.
So, if you want to preserve both materialism and digital mechanism,
you need having "real classical computer" in which physically inactive
parts are playing a physically active role in a computation. That
seems nonsensical to me, and if it is sensical, that would be a reason
to refuse an artificial digital brain, which by definition preserve
consciousness by saving what is relevant for the computation (at some
digital level) to be processed. Negating the 323 principle for
classical computer introduces some kind of magic in the mind-brain
relationship.
The UD emulates also the quantum computations.
Yes that's another formulation of the same proposition. But I
wonder how it emulates the non-interaction experiments. The
conventional computation assumes true randomness.
In QM-without-collapse, true randomness is a comp first person
indeterminacy effect. The UD emulates all non interaction experiments
by emulating the global "observer+physical devices" quantum
multiplication effects.
If you come back with collapse or true randomness, then quantum
computation is no more emulable by classical machine, and you can
indeed say no the doctor when he proposes a classical digital
artificial brain. But then you have to admit that we are no more
Turing emulable. This is just saying that comp, digital mechanism, is
false.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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