Agree. Very odd to make the statement "Since lossy integration would necessitate continuous damage to existing memories" appear to be so controversial that it necessitates the move to a theory of lossless integration. What could be more "natural" than memories that degrade? I suppose there are folks with photographic memories who may seem to approach "lossless integration" but the rest of us are still conscious :-) I have my doubts about photographic memory anyway.
More likely that they had a result starting from the premise of lossless integration they wanted to publish, and made that move to inflate the relevance of their result. Terren On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 1:50 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > Oops. I forgot to include the link: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.0126v1.pdf > > > > -------- Original Message -------- > > I don't buy it. For one thing memory IS lossy and it's largely > reconstruction. I think their argument only shows that cognition is > irreversible in a stat-mech sense. The implication for saying 'yes' or > 'no' to the doctor would be that substituting for a small part of your > brain might scramble your memories/peronality - but it would still be in > principle possible to replace your whole brain by a equivalent Turing > machine. But I question even that step. I think one's consciousness is > embedded and to some degree 'integrated' into the world; it's this > integration and reference to the world that provides 'meaning'. > > Brent > > Is Consciousness Computable? Quantifying Integrated Information Using > Algorithmic Information Theory > Phil Maguire, Philippe Moser, Rebecca Maguire, Virgil Griffith > (Submitted on 1 May 2014) > > In this article we review Tononi's (2008) theory of consciousness as > integrated information. We argue that previous formalizations of integrated > information (e.g. Griffith, 2014) depend on information loss. Since lossy > integration would necessitate continuous damage to existing memories, we > propose it is more natural to frame consciousness as a lossless integrative > process and provide a formalization of this idea using algorithmic > information theory. We prove that complete lossless integration requires > noncomputable functions. This result implies that if unitary consciousness > exists, it cannot be modelled computationally. > > > -- > 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. > -- 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.
