On 31 Oct 2013, at 06:19, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/30/2013 9:36 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 4:24 PM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 31 October 2013 10:50, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 10/30/2013 11:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
and that personal survival from moment to moment is exactly the
same as survival during a duplication experiment. In comp, at
least, a person is a series of discrete states, a "Capsule theory"
of memory and identity
I find that theory lacking. It is usually expressed as a sequence
of "observer moments" with the implication that the moment consists
of a state of consciousness and that this state belongs to
sequences according to its inherent content. But how finely
divided can these moments be? If they are very fine then they
haven't enough content to provide specific linkage to other moments
and a given OM will fit in infinitely many sequences, including
circular ones - so the theory effectively fails to identify any
person at all.
So suppose the OM are 'longer'; then they are not 'moments' and
they can be connected by overlapping rather than by some 'inherent'
content. This is essentially Bertrand Russell's theory of time.
Or suppose that even though they are short, so that there is no
'overlap', they have a lot of content that allows them to form
specific enough sequences to be considered persons, e.g. memories.
But that is inconsistent with them being *conscious* moments - what
one is conscious of is (a) not momentary and (b) doesn't usually
include conscious memories. This problem can be avoided by
supposing that the OM is more than just the observer's conscious
thought, but rather a 'capsule' as envisioned by Julian Barbour.
But that effectively brings back physics and the brain as the extra
information carried along with conscious thought.
I think the point here is that IF consciousness is Turing-
emulable, THEN it can be split up into discrete sequential states,
which we can call OMs for convenience, even though they may in
practice be far shorter than anything we'd recognise as a moment
(e.g. they could be one Planck time long). Since comp assumes
consciousness is TE, OMs must exist in comp. The question is
whether this premise of comp is correct (at any level).
I have doubts that a conscious brain state can manifest or be
encapsulated within a single plank time. At that time scale,
essentially no computation occurs in the brain at all (at the level
of the neurons) from one Plank Time to the next. I think instead,
that the computational state of the experience can be smeared out
in time (just as it is already smeared out in space). If you think
about the difference between an AI brain implemented on a parallel
processor vs. a single threaded processor, they may implement the
same exact program and the same exact computational state, but the
single threaded one will be spread out through time to a greater
extent, while the parallel processor is more spread out through
space. In no case, though, can a brain/conscious state be zero
dimensional in space and time: it would be only a single Plank
volume. So if the informational state of a brain can be spread out
through space, I think given relativity there is no reason to
believe it cannot also be spread out through time.
What are space and time in the computational world of the UD? We're
trying to recover time by defining sequences of 'thoughts'.
We need the order 0, 1, 2, 3, ... to get the computational steps. But
subjective time should be (and is) recoverd by the first person pov
(Bp & p), and physical time is an open problem.
Bruno
Brent
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