On 9 May 2014 13:05, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 5/8/2014 5:22 PM, LizR wrote: > > On 9 May 2014 05:07, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> On 08 May 2014, at 00:35, LizR wrote: >> (By the way I think Max Tegmark does a good job of explaining what this >> means in his book, even if he doesn't get to the reversal. He says you need >> to assume a "capsule theory of memory" and talks about observer moments a >> lot, which hammers home the point that any given OM could be instantiated >> in a computer, in a Boltzmann brain, in arithmetic etc. >> >> In arithmetic? >> > > Or Platonia, or wherever it is the UD lives. > >> >> (to me the term OM is ambiguous, and people confuses easily first >> person OM, which I think don't really exist or make sense, and third person >> OM, which are "just" relative computational state). >> >> OK, well this could get confusing then! I forget how Max Tegmark > defines an OM in the book. I think probably fairly informally. It seems to > me that if consciousness is somehow produced by computation then it has to > have states and steps between them, and an OM might be a state. However I > admit I don't know what an OM is, and some might say the brain operates on > a 1/10th of a second cycle or similar, and hence an OM is quite a long time > compared to the possible underlying computational steps. > > > And if an OM consists of a sequence of many computational steps, then > there can be an overlap with preceding and succeeding OM as well as many > other computational threads which are not "observer" (i.e. conscious) > moments. In fact the word "moment" seems misleading since it suggests an > atom of time or computation. >
ISTM that a computational theory of consciousness would have "time steps" that are far shorter than what an observer would consider a "moment". To put it another way, if consciousness is produced by a computation, then that computation must be in a given state at a given time, and this state will last for a very, very small fraction of what is experienced as an OM. So a Boltzmann brain, for example, would be far more likely to generate one computational state than a whole OM (although given an infinite number of BBs, I suppose that doesn't matter, since the experiencer will get all the required states to build all his OMs ... even if they occur a googolplex light years apart, or just a googolplex years apart, and in a random order...) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
