On 5/10/2015 5:01 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 11 May 2015 at 04:41, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
On 5/10/2015 3:58 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 10 May 2015 at 08:59, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote:
In fact physical systems are not capable of computation at all,
without an observer to provide symbolic meaning to the activity. After
all, what's going on in a PC or Mac are actually changes in analogue
voltage levels, where the engineers designate certain voltage ranges
as 0 or 1. (eg <1v means 0 and > 2v means 1, with in between levels
indeterminate).
The interesting thing about this is to consider what happens when the
physical system is implementing a conscious computation. One could claim
that any physical system implements any computation under some mapping of
system states to computational states, but an objection to this is that it
is, if not false, vacuous, because the "computer" cannot interact with its
environment. For example, it can't be used to provide us the result of a
calculation, because the result must already be known in order to know the
mapping.
But if the computation implements a consciousness with no interaction with
the environment, that objection fails: the computation creates its own
observer,
But what does it observe? I think an environment is necessary - not
necessarily at the moment, but to provide reference/meaning to the
computation that is conscious.
It observes itself if it is dreaming, or it observes the virtual
environment. If it observes its virtual environment, there is no
necessity that that either the observer or the environment interact
with the world at the level of the substance of their implementation.
True, but a virtual environment to an AI is an environment just like anyother. It is
generally talked about as if it's separate, but I think the two must be considered as a whole.
Brent
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