On 5/10/2019 6:59 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Thu, May 9, 2019 at 7:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[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.
Here you are working in physical time. But in Bruno's arithmetical
world physical time is another simulated variable, not related to
computational steps in thread.
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.
What's significant about "uninterrupted"? I've had my consciousness
interrupted several times and, in the words of Mark Twain, suffered no
inconvenience there from. "Interrupted" can only be understood relative
to a physical world."
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.
How would you know, even if they were drastically different? How would
you ever have a "state of consciousness" which was not "for you"?...i it
included inconsistent memories...as happens with people suffering
multiple-personality disorder.
Are these simulations responding to unconscious inputs from...what? the
physical world?
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.
My mistake. I meant to write "..is NOT the same as the temporal order
of thoughts."
Brent
Jason
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