Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 May 2015, at 08:58, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Part of my problem is that the UD does not execute any actual program
sequentially: after each step in a program it executes the next step
of the next program and so on, until it reaches the first step of some
program, at which point it loops back to the start.
The UD does execute sequentially *each* specific program, but the UD
adds delays, due to its dovetailing duties, which we already know (step
2) that it does not change the first person experience of the entiuty
supported by that execution.
So if the conscious moment is evinced by a logical sequence of steps
by the dovetailer, it does not correspond to any particular program,
but a rather arbitrary assortment of steps from many programs.
?
Each execution of the programs is well individuated in the UD*. You can
descrbied them by sequences
phi_i^k(j) k = 0, 1, 2, ... (with i and j fixed).
But each step of the dovetailer is just a single application of the
axioms of the Turing machine in question: one of the
Kxy gives x,
Sxyz gives xz(yz),
for example. These single steps are all that there is in the dovetailer.
But such steps lack a context -- they make no sense on their own. You
could simply claim that the two basic steps are all that is needed --
consciousness self-assembles by taking as many of these in whatever
order is needed.
If the next step of program phi_i is some 10^50 or so dovetailer steps
away, the only thing that could possibly link these is the program phi_i
itself -- the actual execution of the steps is entirely secondary. In
which case, one would say that consciousness resides in the program
phi_i itself - execution on the dovetailer is not required. I do not
think you would want to go down this path, so you need something to give
each step a context, something to link the separate steps that are
required for consciousness.
The teleportation arguments of Steps 1-7 are insufficient for this,
since in that argument you are teleporting complete conscious entities,
not just single steps of the underlying program.
Of course, given that all programs are executed, this sequence of
steps does correspond to some program, somewhere, but not necessarily
any of the ones partially executed for generating that conscious moment.
Yes. So what?
I was trying to give you a way out of the problems that I have raised
above. If you don't see that the sequential steps of the actual
dovetailer program give the required connectivity, then what does? You
did, some time ago, claim that the dovetailer steps gave an effective
time parameter for the system. But even that requires a contextual link
between the steps -- something that would be given by the underlying
stepping -- which is not the stepping of each individual program phi_i.
Bruce
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