On 8/18/2014 1:35 AM, LizR wrote:
On 18 August 2014 20:10, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 18 August 2014 14:24, LizR <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > On 18 August 2014 15:49, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> I think that a sustained stream of consciousness will probably be part of >> a computation that instantiates physics - instantiates a whole universe >> complete with physics. > > It would need to instantiate a stable enough universe that something capable > of computation can evolve there, I imagine. Certainly if one assumes that > the comp reversal doesn't happen. I was thinking of the case where the comp reversal does happen. If it doesn't happen, then I don't think comp can be true.I thought the comp reversal indicates that the computations don't instantiate a universe (although they do instantiate the appearance of one), so taking this comment together with your first comment quoted above, you're "having your cake and eating it" here. Either comp is false in which case computations can instantiate a universe plus physics, or comp is true and they instantiate consciousness, and physics somehow appears as a result. Isn't that right?>> However, the point that I wanted to make was that if computation can >> instantiate consciousness then there is nothing to stop a recording, a >> Boltzmann Brain, a rock and so on from doing so; for these possibilities >> have been used as arguments against computationalism or to arbitrarily >> restrict computationalism. >> > As I think Brent has pointed out previously, any process can be defined as a > computation - this is another form of the Chinese room, I think, the idea > that since just about anything can be treated as performing a computation if > looked at in the rignt way, there is no way to get any meaning into a > computation - it's pure syntax without semantics. The computation or brain creates its own meaning if it is the type of computation or brain that generates consciousness.Yes, the meaning has to be internal to the computation, it's a 1p thing as we like to say around here, rather than 3p.> I'm not sure how this restricts comp, however, because according to comp > there are an infinite number of abstract computations backing up each moment > of consciousness, and if you add to these a few computations performed by > rocks or Boltzmann brains (or ordinary brains) you aren't actually adding > anything to the existing infinity. That's right. The restriction on comp is to say, for example, that only computational devices with the right kind of counterfactual behaviour can generate consciousness, which would negate step 8 of the UDA.Yes, I still haven't had a satisfactory answer on what that would mean for a computation - i.e. what physically differentiates identical computations with different counterfactual add-ons that don't actually get used.
It's confusing because comp assumes computation is done by classical physics, but real physics is QM. In QM the existence of possibilities that aren't realized affect outcomes, just look up the Elitzur-Vaiman bomb detector. The Everett interpretation of this is that those possibilities are realized in other branches, and branches can interfere with one another.
Of course with comp that question becomes meaningless because 'physical" becomes secondary, and all computations passing through a moment of consciousness are equivalent, whether in a brain, a rock etc.
I'm not even sure what a computation passing through means. A I understand it the UD can be thought of as an expanding number of copies of some canonical Turing machine executing all possible programs. So in total this array of computations will never repeat the same state. The Turing machines are all the same so if two machines are in the same state and their tapes are in the same state (and note that "at the same time" is meaningless) then they will each do the same computation. So the computations instantiating some "moment of consciousness" must be different at some lower "microscopic" level; otherwise they couldn't diverge in later steps.
(Of course comp assumes there IS such a thing as a definable moment of consciousness, by the nature of computation.)
I don't think it has to be sharply defined. If you assume the brain instantiates consciousness, it's pretty clear that the brain is a distributed asynchronous computer so computations are distributed in both space and time and what corresponds to a "moment of consciousness" (an atom of thought?) has duration corresponding to what would be many computational steps in a digital emulation.
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