On 19 August 2014 07:10, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
What we know is that the brain can generate consciousness. The brain is not > a digital computer running a program, but if it can be simulated by one, > and if the simulation is conscious, and if the program can be "run" in > Platonia rather than on a physical computer, then every possible brain's > consciousness will necessarily be instantiated. I'm not sure whether > self-referential computations on their own are conscious - that would seem > a further assumption on top of the three mentioned in the previous sentence > - even though it does seem more elegant than simulating klunky brains. > Well, what I was responding to was "..I'm not sure how instantiating the appearance of physics is different to instantiating (virtual) physics." Virtual or digital physics, presumably taking specifically physical computations as its "primitives", would characterise "the brain" as a physical composite object hierarchically reducible to such primitives. Comp, by contrast, seeks to justify the observed dominance of lawlike physical appearances against the background of the fractal computational explosion implied by the dovetailer. So in comp terms, "the brain" must ultimately correspond to a fungible class of self-referential computations that is able (somehow) to predominate statistically over a cosmic snowstorm of competing "machine psychologies". All that said, as Bruno is wont to say, digital or virtual physics as a primitive appears to be self-defeating. On the assumption of CTM it will inevitably be trumped by the Vastly more extensive machine psychology extractable from the dovetailer and hence become explanatorily irrelevant. As to computations instantiating consciousness without (or as I would prefer to say, logically prior to) instantiating physics, I guess we would need more distinctions about consciousness as a general theoretical or logical concept to make sense of this. ISTM that this is just what Bruno is attempting to do with AUDA. As I remarked to Brent, it might be expected that any analysis of very basic logical relations at this level would be at quite some remove from our usual intuitions about consciousness. Nonetheless, the project, if successful, must ultimately prove capable of justifying their relevance to "normal" human experience. David -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
