Ok, so this is where I would disagree. It only seems that to define a
computation you need to look at the time evolution, because a snapshot
doesn't contain enough information about the dynamics of the system.
But here one considers all of the enormous amount of information stored
in the brain, and that is a mistake, as we are only ever aware of a
small fraction of this information.
So, the OM has to be defined as some properly coarse grained picture of
the full information content of the entire brain. In the MWI picture,
the full brain-enviroment state is in state of the form:
Sum over i of |brain_i>|environment_i>
where all the |brain_i> define the same macrostate. This state contains
also the information about how the brain has computed the output from
the input, so it is a valid computatonal state. If you were to observe
exactly which of the many microstates the brain is in, then you would
lose this information. But no human can ever observe this informainion
in another brain (obviously it wouldn't fit in his brain).
So, the simplistic picture of some machine being in a precisely defined
bit state is misleading. That would only be accessible to a
superobserver who has much more memory than that machine. The machine's
subjective world should be thought as a set of paralllel worlds each
having a slightly different information content entangled with the
environment.
Saibal
Citeren meekerdb <[email protected]>:
My point is not that a snapshot brain (or computer) state lacks
content, but that if it is an emulation of a brain (or a real brain)
the snapshot cannot be an observer moment or a thought. The latter
must have much longer duration and overlap one another in time. I
think there has been a casual, but wrong, implicit identification of
the discrete states of a Turing machine emulating a brain with some
rather loosely defined "observer moments". That's why I thought
Eagleman's talk was interesting.
Brent
On 10/3/2011 8:01 AM, [email protected] wrote:
I can't answer for Brent, but my take in this is that what matters
is whether the state of the system at any time represents a
computation being performed. So, this whole "duration
requirment" is not necessary, a snapshot of the system contains
information about what program is being run. So, it is a mistake to
think that OMs lack content and are therefore not computational
states.
Saibal
Citeren Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]>:
On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 9:47 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
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.
Do you think that if you insert pauses between a, b and c so that
there is no overlap you create a zombie?
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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