On Thu, May 9, 2019 at 7:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> > > On 5/9/2019 5:18 PM, Jason Resch wrote: > > > > That all subjectively indistinguishable computations going through > > that state are a possibility means the consciousness cannot identify > > itself with any one particular thread of computation. In this sense > > that consciousness is not the same as one of the programs passing > > through that state. But to say the consciousness is not identical > > with one of the computations is different from saying that computation > > is not conscious. If none of the threads of computation resulted in > > consciousness, you wouldn't magically get consciousness once you > > reached an infinite number of them. The only thing you gain with the > > infinite number of all the computations going through that state is > > the correct statistics regarding the future evolution of that conscious. > > "The state" seems a problematic concept to me. It tries to roughly > equate a state of consciousness, a thought, with a state of a Turing > machine (plus tape). I would distinguish between thoughts and machine states. Consider a physical brain, with many interacting neurons running in parallel. To represent some unit of time of neuronal interaction would require for a conventional von Neumann architecture computer, a long string of processing. Or more simply, if you imagine computing the next state of a 100x100 Game of Life universe, it requires a Turing machine to process many steps in a sequence before it produces the next Game of Life state. I think it is similar with thoughts, a thought involves much more than a simple arithmetical operation applied to a single 64-bit register. > But saying yes to the doctor implies a much lower > level of substitution than "a thought". To be clear the doctor is replacing part of your brain (e.g. let's say a cluster of 1,000,000 neurons with some digital machinery. Rather than replacing a single thought of yours. It is up to the continuing operation of your brain, working with this digital part, to maintain your stream of consciousness. > Thoughts come from perceptions, > among other things, which are not complete thoughts or "states of > consciousness". So it is not at all clear what it means for > "computations going thru that state" when the state may refer to > thousands of steps of the Turing machine. Is a computation thread that > share 999 of the states "going thru the state"? I view "computations going though my state" as those computations which exceed the level of accuracy necessary for my consciousness to continue uninterrupted. For example, say there was a Mark I neuronal cluster chip which simulates only the inputs and outputs of the 1M neurons using a lookup table, then there is a Mark II which simulates the neurons, a Mark III model which simulates the neurons glial cells and some of the biochemistry, and a Mark IV which simulates the molecules and proteins, and a Mark V that simulates all the atoms of those neurons. It may be that Mark I - Mark III are insufficient, and would lead to perceptibly different states of consciousness for me. While Mark IV - V are accurate enough that they preserve my consciousness. In this case the computations of the Mark IV and Mark V chips, while different, both support my conscious state. > And to further > complicate this mapping between thoughts and machine states, there > sequence of machine states is the same at the temporal order of thoughts. > > It can add confusion, it is best to view that as coincidental. Though there may be a deep relation, between our existence in a universe having the property of time, and our existence as computations. Jason -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CA%2BBCJUhYFcM-_FdKXQohREdzPERiMem_w_WWg16pPGOccs1ZCQ%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
