On 03 Oct 2011, at 19:12, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/3/2011 9:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 03 Oct 2011, at 00:47, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/2/2011 7:13 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:01 AM, meekerdb<[email protected]>
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?
Some care has to be taken on the wording. With the computational
supervenience thesis, "you" are not a bundle of computations that
are passing through "your" current state, "you" (1-you) are a
person, with referential and self-referential means
I thought you were trying to explain what a person is in terms of
arithmetic and computations. Now you seem to be invoking "person"
as a separate entity.
I am not sure to understand you. Both in UDA and AUDA I define notion
of person. In UDA I use the notion of personal diary or memory being
annihilated and reconstituted, and in AUDA I use the theory of
machine's self-reference. This relates that "separate entity" to
arithmetic, even if the relation are less trivial than assuming some
link between mind and instantiation of computation.
and that 1-you only supervene on that bundle of computations. Your
actions and decisions, through the computational state of the self-
referential programs, can "select" among quite different "bundles
of computations" .
You put "select" in scare quotes. So are you saying that you select
(via free will?) which bundles of computations "you" supervene on?
or which are your most probable continuation?
Both. You choose between being duplicated in Washington/Moscow or
Sidney/Beijing. That choice influence your future? If you choose
Sidney/Beijing, you will still select Sidney or Beijing, but this you
cannot influence.
Of course a sort of God could see all what happened in your brain, and
determine you choice, but that God is not available to you, and your
choice remains a free choice, in the compatibilist approach to free-
will.
"You" are a living conscious person with partial free will and
taxes, and gravitational constraints, and things like that
apparently, you can memorize them, make planning, scheduling, etc.
As UM knowing we are UMs (like any LUMs) we know we can change
ourselves, it is part of our first personhood.
The computational states are sharp, discrete things. The brains
states are fuzzy distributed things.
Brain states are computational states. Just take a Turing machine
emulating a brain (at the right level).
A crisp computational state can represent a fuzzy brain state, and
also can belong to a fuzzy set of crisp state, which is relevant
for the 1-p statistics.
Fuzzy Turing machine are Turing emulable, like quantum computer are
Turing emulable too, despite the extravagant relative slow down
that we can suspect.
Yes, I understand that. But brain states are not "states of
consciousness", i.e. "thoughts" or "observer moments".
I think that I will abandon the notion of OMs. At least for awhile.
It is quite misleading in the context of the comp-supervenience
thesis. I thought that I could use it by distinguishing 3-OMs
(computational states) and 1-OMs (the subjectivity of someone going
through that states). But the subjectivity is related to the whole set
arithmetical neighborhoods which makes that state an element of many
computations.
I think that I have to dig deeper on the semantics of the X1* logics
(the true (driven by G*) logic of Bp & Dt & p), to see if some sense
can be retrieved for Bostrom (first person) OMs.
Bruno
Brent
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