On Thu, May 9, 2019 at 7:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List < everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. 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.
