Yah Dan, I used to be a stong, anti-Platonist because, outside the human brain, nothing else could count. Then biolgists found out that some primates and birds appeared to. This brings me into the notion that consciousness could also be substrate independent. One huge argument for me, was reading physicist Leonard Susskinds' reworking of Boltzmann's Boltzmann Brain argument in 2007. I think his paper was called "The Census Taker's Hat." There have been many discussions on the web between philosophers and scientists regarding hypercomputing and consciousness, including some BB discussions, and relatedly, Goertzel's concepts. So, being an idiot, I did follow a ridiculous hypothesis that indicates that God might be a Boltzmann Brain, who created the Universe and the Multiverse. God, perhaps, being the chief of all hypercomputer, including ourselves, and whomever else might be out there. Goertzel had an article last year, connected with all this call "reincarnation machines" and this is not the full title. There's an old article about BB's and Observers from 2009, called "The God Impossible, which I found interesting. So are we a subset of a gigantic hypercomputer?
-----Original Message----- From: Dan <[email protected]> To: Everything List <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Dec 10, 2015 8:47 pm Subject: Is consciousness hypercomputable? Digital physics rests upon the Strong Church-Turing Thesis, which posits that nature does not admit non-computable real numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis#Philosophical_implications AI researcher Ben Goertzel discusses the "Hypercomputable HumanlikeIntelligence hypothesis, which suggests that thecrux of humanlike intelligence is some sort ofmental manipulation of uncomputable entities –i.e., some process of “hypercomputation” [1-6].": http://goertzel.org/papers/CognitiveInformaticsHypercomputationPaper.pdf This recent article seems to imply that there non-computable real numbers exist in nature. Would you agree? If so, does this not falsify the Strong Church Turing Thesis? That then seems to make the HHI hypothesis possible, and if the HHI hypothesis could be verified then according to Goertzel's argument science would never be able to describe cognition. (He's concerned about the implications that would have for neuroscience and AI, naturally.): http://factor-tech.com/connected-world/21062-a-fundamental-quantum-physics-problem-has-been-proved-unsolvable/ I've only come across this mailing list after reading Standish's "Theory of Nothing." On my blog, I have been compiling various recent work regarding the fabric of reality. It attempts to tie together Chaitin's metabiology (life as evolving software), Hoffman's Interface Theory of Perception and Dynamics of Two Conscious Agents, modeling by Deutsch/Wallace of the Born rule using rational agents and decision theory, Standish's derivation of QM as implementation of evolution, Alex Wissner-Gross's Entropic Causal Forces relating intelligence to emergence/entropy, Frieden's Extreme Physical Information which seems to explain evolution as a program applying the anthropic principle and operating on particles and ideas (which are simply dual aspects of information, taken from a multiverse of infinite bit strings a la Standish or plentitude of mathematical structures a la Tegmark). It also considers the work of Bolognesi in "Algorithmic Causal Sets for a Computational Spacetime" and Schmidhuber's Goedel Machine,Theory of Creativity, and universal dovetailer. I suppose my current hypothesis about the fabric of reality (prior to fully grasping Tegmark's hypothesis) can be summarized as follows: Particles and ideas are two sides of the same coin: information. Driven by the anthropic Extreme Physical Information principle that nature is kind to observers (as efficiently as possible-- Occam's razor), ideas and "particles" evolve algorithmically in much the same way that genes do. What remains to be answered is why nature should be kind to observers, or - perhaps more fundamentally- what does it really mean to be an observer? Is it just a rational agent, similar perhaps to a Goedel machine? When we say nature is kind to observers, do we really imply that the rational agents ensure their own existence by maximizing novel pattern compression progress and possible future actions (as suggested by Hoffman's Conscious Agent Thesis)? Please forgive me if I repeat myself or produce "word salad" -- it can be difficult for me to sequence my thoughts linearly as I struggle to get them all down, so upon request I will clarify what I mean by anything above. I appreciate your patience and am eager to read your reply. -- 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. -- 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.
