On 10/2/2011 7:13 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:01 AM, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments
can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious
moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at
different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps
simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience
provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal
intervals occurs somewhere, sometime.
That sounds like a temporal homunculus. :-)
Note that on a nanosecond scale there is no "state of the brain".
Relativity applies to brains too and so the time order of events on
opposite sides of your head only defined to within about a nanosecond.
The brain is limited for technical reasons, relativity being the least
of them.
Sure. Action potentials are only few hundred meters/sec.
It isn't possible to stop it for a microsecond and restart it
at exactly the same state. With a computer you can do this although
you are limited to discrete digital states: you can't save the state
as logic circuits are transitioning from 1 to 0.
But you can do it, and in fact it's implicit in a Turing machine, i.e. an abstract
computation. So I'm wondering what consequences this has for Bruno's idea that "you" are
a bundle of computations that are passing through "your" current state? The computational
states are sharp, discrete things. The brains states are fuzzy distributed things.
But this doesn't
change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it,
the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a
matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be
arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on
machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are
of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the
observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the
observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the
atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack
content.
I think we've discussed this before. It you define them as A, B, C then the lack of
content means they don't have inherent order; where as AB, BC, CD,... do have inherent
order because they overlap. I don't think this affects the argument except to note that
OMs are not the same as computational states.
Brent
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