On 04 Oct 2011, at 02:27, [email protected] wrote:
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.
I agree. Even without QM, and just DM, once we get "the many dreams
interpretation of arithmetic" (to be short).
Bruno
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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