On 2/13/2012 12:11 PM, Joseph Knight wrote:
I think you should probably read Maudlin's paper
<http://www.finney.org/%7Ehal/maudlin.pdf> for specifics. I don't
think thermodynamics will have much to do with the conclusions,
whatever they may be (and I don't think it's obvious what /exactly
/Maudlin showed).
Hi Joseph,
Thank you for the new link to Maudlin''s paper. I was having a hard
time finding my copy... As to your comment: Would you consider exactly
what a "computational structure" means in a universe that allows for
perpetual motion <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion>? (We
are going to run a reductio argument
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum>...)
One thing that I see is that in such a universe we would have a
huge White Rabbit problem because all brains in it would only be those
of the Boltzmann type <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain>.
There could not be any invariant form of sequencing that we could run a
UD on. How so? Becasue in a universe without thermodynamics there is no
such a thing as a sequence of events that is invariant with respect to
transitions from one observer to another, i.e. there would be no such
thing as time definable in a 'dimensional' sense. All sequences would be
at best Markov <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_property>. With such
a restriction to Markov processes, how to you define a UD? Without a UD,
how do we get COMP to work?
Onward!
Stephen
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 7:21 AM, Stephen P. King
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi Folks,
I have been mulling over my conversations with Bruno, Joseph
and ACW in the EVERYTHING list and have a question. In SANE04 we
read the following:
"For any given precise running computation associated to some
inner experience, you
can modify the device in such a way that the amount of
physical activity involved is
arbitrarily low, and even null for dreaming experience which has
no inputs and no outputs.
Now, having suppressed that physical activity present in the
running computation, the
machine will only be accidentally correct. It will be correct only
for that precise computation,
with unchanged environment. If it is changed a little bit, it
will make the machine running
computation no more relatively correct. But then, Maudlin
ingenuously showed that
counterfactual correctness can be recovered, by adding non
active devices which will be
triggered only if some (counterfactual) change would appear
in the environment. Now this
shows that any inner experience can be associated with an
arbitrary low (even null) physical
activity, and this in keeping counterfactual correctness.
And that is absurd with the
conjunction of both comp and materialism."
Setting aside the problem of concurrency for now, how is it
that we are jumping over the difference between infinitely slow or
even "adiabatic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_process>"
physical process and "null" physical process?
I may be not even wrong here, but in math isn't it true that there
is a big difference between a quantity being arbitrarily small and
a quantity being zero? I suspect that the folks in FOAR List that
have been discussing information and entropy might have a thought
on this.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
