On 6/23/2015 8:18 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 24 June 2015 at 02:00, John Clark <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > consciousness may not need physical instantiation, which is where unfetteredcomputationalism leads.People like Bruno are the only ones who believe in "unfettered computationalism", everybody else knows there is not one single example of a computation being made without a physical instantiation, not even 1+1; and nobody has even the ghost of a hint of a hunch of an idea of how to do such a thing.The problem is to deal with the consequences of computationalism that Scott Aaronson has raised in the blog, and have been raised many times on this list: can a lookup table be conscious? What about a lookup table that is not actually consulted? What about Boltzmann Brains? What about Maudlin's Klara or Bruno's MGA? What about a rock?
I think Scott is right that participation in the arrow-of-time is necessary. But I don't think that goes far enough. I think interaction with sizable chunk of environment, enough to ensure that AoT via decoherence into the far future is necessary, and for the consciousness to be human-like the environment has to be "human-like", i.e. consist of persistent objects and a big entropy gradient of radiation.
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