On 9/4/2012 9:48 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Taking another look at Sane2004. This isn't so much as a challenge to
Bruno, just sharing my notes of why I disagree. Not sure how far I
will get this time, but here are my objections to the first step and
the stipulated assumptions of comp. I understand that the point is to
accept the given definition of comp, and in that respect, I have no
reason to doubt that Bruno has accomplished what he sets out to as far
as making a good theory within comp, and if he has not, I wouldn't be
qualified to comment on it anyhow. From my perspective however, this
is all beside the point, since the only point that matters is the
actual truth of what consciousness actually is, and what is it's
actual relation to physics and information. Given the fragile and
precious nature of our own survival, I think that implications for
teleportation and AI simulation/personhood which are derived from pure
theory rather than thorough consideration of realism would be reckless
to say the least.
Hi Craig,
Excellent post!
*Step one* talks about teleportation in terms of being reconstructed
with ambient organic materials. If comp were true though, no organic
materials or reconstructions would be necessary. The scanning into a
universal machine would be sufficient.
Yep, the assumption is that the function that gives rise to Sense
is exactly representable as countable and recursively enumerable
functions. The trick is finding the machine configuration that matches
each of these. That's where the engineers come in and the theorists go
out the door.
Taking this to the China Brain level, the universal machine could be a
trillion people with notebooks, pencils, paper, and erasers, talking
to each other over cell phones. This activity would have to
collectively result in the teleported person now being conjured as if
by incantation as a consequence of...what? The writing and erasing on
paper? The calling and speaking on cell phones? Where does the
experience of the now disembodied person come in?
The "person" rides the computation, it is not "located" any
particular place. But all this is predicated on the condition that
consciousness is, at its more rubimentary level, nothing but countable
and recursively enumerable functions. THe real question that we need to
ask is: Might there be a point where we no longer are dealing with
countable and recursively enumerable functions? What about countable and
recursively enumerable functions that are coding for other countable and
recursively enumerable functions? Are those still "computable"? So far
the answer seems to be: Yes, they are. But what about the "truth" of the
statements that those countable and recursively enumerable functions
encode? Are they countable and recursively enumerable functions? Nope!
Those are something else entirely!
Step one talks about annihilation as well, but it is not clear what
role this actually plays in the process, except to make it seem more
like teleportation and less like what it actually would be, which is
duplication. If I scan an original document and email the scan, I have
sent a duplicate, not teleported the original.
Notice that both the duplication and the teleportation, as
discussed, assume that the information content is exactly copyable. This
is not qubits that are involved... The point here is that this comp
model assume that Reality is, at is ground level, classical. This is
where my head starts spinning
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO9FD7zI7k0> with Bruno's ideas....
I have problems with all three of the comp assumptions:
*yes, doctor*: This is really the sleight of hand that props up the
entire thought experiment. If you agree that you are nothing but your
brain function and that your brain function can be replaced by the
functioning of non-brain devices, then you have already agreed that
human individuality is a universal commodity.
Ummhummm, but it is! Why is that is so amazing?! Out notion of
individuality is tied to the "autonomously moving and detecting and
feeding and reproducing" machine that our minds inhabit! Why does its
precise constitution matter? All that matters is that it can "exactly"
carry our the necessary functions. Individual minds are just different
"versions" of one and the same mind! To steal an idea from Deutsch,
Other histories are just different universes are just different minds...
The hard question is: How the hell do they get synchronized with each other?
We know that the synchronization cannot exist "ahead of time",
simply because that is a massive contradiction! What if the
synchronization is just "accidental" (like Bruno proposes)? Well, not
sure about how that would solve the problem! Why? Because the chances of
an "accidental" synchronization of an arbitrarily long sequence of
matchings between arbitrarily many minds (each defined in terms of
infinitely many computations intersecting) is vanishingly small. It is
exactly zero! "Huston, We Have A Problem!"
Benjayk et al are posting about a related subject in the thread:
RE: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence It is all
focused on the problem of the axiom of choice and constructability. I
think the problem can be recast as a computational complexity problem,
but I have been known to be not even wrong on occasion. My evidence is
that the limitation that we see in the real world on computers is the
scarcity of resources, which is why P does not equal NP IMHO. Without an
eternally and exponentially expanding supply of resources (or tape), the
UD simply cannot be run. Not even one step!
Might this be just a form of an imperative on the existence of an
endless supply of universes with exponentially expanding resources?
Isn't this exactly what we observe in the star filled heavens? Maybe we
finitely exist because we must, or else existence would contradict
itself and vanish (like that Penguin in the Bloom County cartoon).
Resources must exist for the computations to occur. We are God's thoughts.
*Church thesis*: Views computation in isolation, irrespective of
resources, supervenience on object-formed computing elements, etc.
This is a theoretical theory of computation, completely divorced from
realism from the start. What is it that does the computing? How and
why does data enter or exit a computation?
It is an ontological theory that seeks to explain the appearance of
"reality", thus it is meta-realism.
*Arithmetical Realism*: The idea that truth values are self justifying
independently of subjectivity or physics is literally a shot in the
dark. Like yes, doctor, this is really swallowing the cow whole from
the beginning and saying that the internal consistency of arithmetic
constitutes universal supremacy without any real indication of that.
Wouldn't computers tend to be self-correcting by virtue of the pull
toward arithmetic truth within each logic circuit? Where do errors
come from?
Craig
That's the right question to be asking! Errors are sentences that
are false in some code. Exactly how does this happen if one's beliefs
are predicated on Bp & p(is true)?
--
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Onward!
Stephen
http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html
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