On 19 August 2014 06:59, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > > You're trying to isolate the consciousness from it's context so that it's > "just" data and patterns and 1s and 0s and neuron pulses. I'm saying > consciousness requires a context, in fact I think it requires a physics. > > This is, I would say, the difference between data and knowledge. Data is indeed 0s and 1s, ultimately, while knowledge is "about something". Hence a random pattern of pixels contains a lot of data, but (almost) no knowledge. However, comp assumes consciousness derives from computation, so if it's correct, at some level I assume consciousness IS based on a huge pattern of 0s and 1s and nothing else (or perhaps that plus a universal Turing machine which runs this pattern as a programme plus input data?). Somehow the environment, the physics, the context emerge from this huge pattern of data plus the computations carried out on it - assuming comp and Bruno's argument - is that right?
But then apparently "comp" -- in a watered- down form -- IS the standard theory (watered down in that the implications aren't normally explored to the extent that practitioners decide that physics and psychology need to be swapped around, at least). So one way or another, neurons or numbers or something similarly distant from our environment are thought to play the parts of a classical computer, which generates our consciousness. So in either view, we end up with something that's all 0s and 1s, or all activation potentials, or all synaptic gaps, or in any case, all something that bears no obvious relationship whatsoever to whatever the system thinks it's thinking about! The thought that "My love is like a red, red rose" say, plus the attentdant emotions, is really "just" a huge pattern of neural or numerical somethings that could in theory be encoded as a very large number. Which I also find quite mind boggling. Somehow abstract-ish stuff, in platonia, or our skulls as the case may be, manages to think it's thinking about something. Although that may just be a failure of my intuition in the face of large amount of computing power... Or am I just picturing comp (in either form) wrongly? -- 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.
