Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 08 Oct 2011, at 04:11, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 3:02 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Nevertheless, you talk about swapping your brain for a suitably designed computer and consciousness surviving teleportation and pauses/restarts of the computer. Yes. As a starting point, these ideas assume the physical supervenience thesis. It does not. At the start it is neutral on this. A computationalist practitioner (knowing UDA, for example) can associate his consciousness with all the computations going through its state, and believe that he will survive locally on the normal computations (the usual physical reality) only because all the pieces of matter used by the doctors share his normal histories, and emulate the right computation on the right level. But the consciousness is not attributed to some physical happening hereby, it is attributed to the infinitely many arithmetical relations defining his possible and most probable histories. Only in step 8 is the physical supervenience assumed, but only to get the reductio ad absurdum. There is no [consciousness] evolving in [time and space]. There is only [consciousness of time and space], evolving (from the internal indexical perspective), but relying and associated on infinities of arithmetical relations (in the 3-view). The progression surely must be to start by assuming that your mind is generated as a result of brain activity, rather than an immaterial soul. Why? Given the number of Aristotelians, it is wise to let them interpret it in that way. But I don't do it. I am neutral, agnostic. No need to assume a primitively real physical universe at the start. I assume yes doctor and Church thesis. saying yes doctor does not imply that we believe in a primitively material doctor, nor a primitively material brains. We need only stable patterns, up to the level we bet on. We need a sufficiently deterministic neighborhood we can trust, but it does not matter where that trust come from (a physical world, a wavy multiverse or the numbers, ...) You then consider whether you would accept a computerised brain and retain consciousness. If you decide yes, you accept computationalism, and if you accept computationalism you can show that physical supervenience is problematic. Yes. But I bring up the physical supervenience, including the assumption of a primary physical universe, only explicitly in step 7 ( with some role), and eliminate it (assuming it again, but for the reductio ad absurdum) in step 8. You then adjust your theory to keep computationalism and drop physical supervenience or drop computationalism altogether. This is the sequence in which most people would think about it. Hmm..., comp admits exactly the same definition throughout all UDA. In some presentation I make it explicit that science has not find any evidence for a primitive material reality. The founders of QM did doubt this for physical reason, too. Physicists never use such hypothesis, except as a tool in everyday life, like each of us. It is an obvious extrapolation from how the animals conceive their neighborhoods. I thought naively that, all scientists knew since Plato, that physicalism and the existence of *primary* physical universe is an hypothesis, and that it is just hard to decide on this before some reasonable progress are made on the mind-body problem. I was naive; It took me time to understand that for some scientists, such physical primitive existence was a non questionable taboo. In it from bit, Wheeler did put some doubt, though. Tegmark and Schmidhuber were close, but dismiss the first persons, which comp illustrates some key role. But you are right, most people will look in that sequence. Most aristotelians confuse mechanism and materialism. And mechanism is often used to eliminate the notion of soul from the materialis view. But digital mechanism and weak materialism don't fit well. It defies Occam. And digital mechanism show machines have quite reasonable notion of souls. Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 3:02 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Nevertheless, you talk about swapping your brain for a suitably designed computer and consciousness surviving teleportation and pauses/restarts of the computer. Yes. As a starting point, these ideas assume the physical supervenience thesis. It does not. At the start it is neutral on this. A computationalist practitioner (knowing UDA, for example) can associate his consciousness with all the computations going through its state, and believe that he will survive locally on the normal computations (the usual physical reality) only because all the pieces of matter used by the doctors share his normal histories, and emulate the right computation on the right level. But the consciousness is not attributed to some physical happening hereby, it is attributed to the infinitely many arithmetical relations defining his possible and most probable histories. Only in step 8 is the physical supervenience assumed, but only to get the reductio ad absurdum. There is no [consciousness] evolving in [time and space]. There is only [consciousness of time and space], evolving (from the internal indexical perspective), but relying and associated on infinities of arithmetical relations (in the 3-view). The progression surely must be to start by assuming that your mind is generated as a result of brain activity, rather than an immaterial soul. You then consider whether you would accept a computerised brain and retain consciousness. If you decide yes, you accept computationalism, and if you accept computationalism you can show that physical supervenience is problematic. You then adjust your theory to keep computationalism and drop physical supervenience or drop computationalism altogether. This is the sequence in which most people would think about it. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 10/7/2011 7:11 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 3:02 AM, Bruno Marchalmarc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Nevertheless, you talk about swapping your brain for a suitably designed computer and consciousness surviving teleportation and pauses/restarts of the computer. Yes. As a starting point, these ideas assume the physical supervenience thesis. It does not. At the start it is neutral on this. A computationalist practitioner (knowing UDA, for example) can associate his consciousness with all the computations going through its state, and believe that he will survive locally on the normal computations (the usual physical reality) only because all the pieces of matter used by the doctors share his normal histories, and emulate the right computation on the right level. But the consciousness is not attributed to some physical happening hereby, it is attributed to the infinitely many arithmetical relations defining his possible and most probable histories. Only in step 8 is the physical supervenience assumed, but only to get the reductio ad absurdum. There is no [consciousness] evolving in [time and space]. There is only [consciousness of time and space], evolving (from the internal indexical perspective), but relying and associated on infinities of arithmetical relations (in the 3-view). The progression surely must be to start by assuming that your mind is generated as a result of brain activity, rather than an immaterial soul. You then consider whether you would accept a computerised brain and retain consciousness. There might be two different choices here. One would be a kind of artificial neuron or bundle of neurons that would be physically placed in your head and designed with the same connectivity as your natural neurons. The other would be a transceiver that would send out the afferent signals intended for your brain to a computer outside your body which would do some calculation emulating your brain and then sending the result back to the efferent nerves connections. Within the multiverse that is being instantiated by the UD these might correspond to very different states of computation even though they are the same so far as your input/output is concerned. Brent If you decide yes, you accept computationalism, and if you accept computationalism you can show that physical supervenience is problematic. You then adjust your theory to keep computationalism and drop physical supervenience or drop computationalism altogether. This is the sequence in which most people would think about it. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 04 Oct 2011, at 02:27, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote: Ok, so this is where I would disagree. It only seems that to define a computation you need to look at the time evolution, because a snapshot doesn't contain enough information about the dynamics of the system. But here one considers all of the enormous amount of information stored in the brain, and that is a mistake, as we are only ever aware of a small fraction of this information. So, the OM has to be defined as some properly coarse grained picture of the full information content of the entire brain. In the MWI picture, the full brain-enviroment state is in state of the form: Sum over i of |brain_i|environment_i where all the |brain_i define the same macrostate. This state contains also the information about how the brain has computed the output from the input, so it is a valid computatonal state. If you were to observe exactly which of the many microstates the brain is in, then you would lose this information. But no human can ever observe this informainion in another brain (obviously it wouldn't fit in his brain). So, the simplistic picture of some machine being in a precisely defined bit state is misleading. That would only be accessible to a superobserver who has much more memory than that machine. The machine's subjective world should be thought as a set of paralllel worlds each having a slightly different information content entangled with the environment. I agree. Even without QM, and just DM, once we get the many dreams interpretation of arithmetic (to be short). Bruno Saibal Citeren meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net: My point is not that a snapshot brain (or computer) state lacks content, but that if it is an emulation of a brain (or a real brain) the snapshot cannot be an observer moment or a thought. The latter must have much longer duration and overlap one another in time. I think there has been a casual, but wrong, implicit identification of the discrete states of a Turing machine emulating a brain with some rather loosely defined observer moments. That's why I thought Eagleman's talk was interesting. Brent On 10/3/2011 8:01 AM, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote: I can't answer for Brent, but my take in this is that what matters is whether the state of the system at any time represents a computation being performed. So, this whole duration requirment is not necessary, a snapshot of the system contains information about what program is being run. So, it is a mistake to think that OMs lack content and are therefore not computational states. Saibal Citeren Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com: On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 9:47 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. I think we've discussed this before. It you define them as A, B, C then the lack of content means they don't have inherent order; where as AB, BC, CD,... do have inherent order because they overlap. I don't think this affects the argument except to note that OMs are not the same as computational states. Do you think that if you insert pauses between a, b and c so that there is no overlap you create a zombie? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en .
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 03 Oct 2011, at 19:12, meekerdb wrote: On 10/3/2011 9:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 03 Oct 2011, at 00:47, meekerdb wrote: On 10/2/2011 7:13 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:01 AM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. That sounds like a temporal homunculus. :-) Note that on a nanosecond scale there is no state of the brain. Relativity applies to brains too and so the time order of events on opposite sides of your head only defined to within about a nanosecond. The brain is limited for technical reasons, relativity being the least of them. Sure. Action potentials are only few hundred meters/sec. It isn't possible to stop it for a microsecond and restart it at exactly the same state. With a computer you can do this although you are limited to discrete digital states: you can't save the state as logic circuits are transitioning from 1 to 0. But you can do it, and in fact it's implicit in a Turing machine, i.e. an abstract computation. So I'm wondering what consequences this has for Bruno's idea that you are a bundle of computations that are passing through your current state? Some care has to be taken on the wording. With the computational supervenience thesis, you are not a bundle of computations that are passing through your current state, you (1-you) are a person, with referential and self-referential means I thought you were trying to explain what a person is in terms of arithmetic and computations. Now you seem to be invoking person as a separate entity. I am not sure to understand you. Both in UDA and AUDA I define notion of person. In UDA I use the notion of personal diary or memory being annihilated and reconstituted, and in AUDA I use the theory of machine's self-reference. This relates that separate entity to arithmetic, even if the relation are less trivial than assuming some link between mind and instantiation of computation. and that 1-you only supervene on that bundle of computations. Your actions and decisions, through the computational state of the self- referential programs, can select among quite different bundles of computations . You put select in scare quotes. So are you saying that you select (via free will?) which bundles of computations you supervene on? or which are your most probable continuation? Both. You choose between being duplicated in Washington/Moscow or Sidney/Beijing. That choice influence your future? If you choose Sidney/Beijing, you will still select Sidney or Beijing, but this you cannot influence. Of course a sort of God could see all what happened in your brain, and determine you choice, but that God is not available to you, and your choice remains a free choice, in the compatibilist approach to free- will. You are a living conscious person with partial free will and taxes, and gravitational constraints, and things like that apparently, you can memorize them, make planning, scheduling, etc. As UM knowing we are UMs (like any LUMs) we know we can change ourselves, it is part of our first personhood. The computational states are sharp, discrete things. The brains states are fuzzy distributed things. Brain states are computational states. Just take a Turing machine emulating a brain (at the right level). A crisp computational state can represent a fuzzy brain state, and also can belong to a fuzzy set of crisp state, which is relevant for the 1-p statistics. Fuzzy Turing machine are Turing emulable, like quantum computer are Turing emulable too, despite the extravagant relative slow down that we can suspect. Yes, I understand that. But brain states are not states of consciousness, i.e. thoughts or observer moments. I think that I will abandon the notion of OMs. At least for awhile. It is quite misleading in the context of the comp-supervenience thesis. I thought that I could use it by distinguishing 3-OMs (computational states) and 1-OMs (the subjectivity of someone going through that states). But the subjectivity is related to the whole set arithmetical neighborhoods which makes that state an element of many computations. I think that I have to dig deeper on the semantics of the X1* logics (the true (driven by G*) logic of Bp Dt p), to see if some sense can be retrieved for Bostrom (first person) OMs. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 9:47 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. I think we've discussed this before. It you define them as A, B, C then the lack of content means they don't have inherent order; where as AB, BC, CD,... do have inherent order because they overlap. I don't think this affects the argument except to note that OMs are not the same as computational states. Do you think that if you insert pauses between a, b and c so that there is no overlap you create a zombie? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
I can't answer for Brent, but my take in this is that what matters is whether the state of the system at any time represents a computation being performed. So, this whole duration requirment is not necessary, a snapshot of the system contains information about what program is being run. So, it is a mistake to think that OMs lack content and are therefore not computational states. Saibal Citeren Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com: On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 9:47 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. I think we've discussed this before. It you define them as A, B, C then the lack of content means they don't have inherent order; where as AB, BC, CD,... do have inherent order because they overlap. I don't think this affects the argument except to note that OMs are not the same as computational states. Do you think that if you insert pauses between a, b and c so that there is no overlap you create a zombie? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 02 Oct 2011, at 16:21, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 4:16 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. I think that you are crossing the limit of your pedagogical use of the physical supervenience thesis. You might be led to a direct contradiction, which might lead to a new proof of its inconsistency. Consciousness cannot be associated with any particular implementation (physical or not) of a computation. It is related to an infinity of computations, structured by the self (or possible self-reference). Nevertheless, you talk about swapping your brain for a suitably designed computer and consciousness surviving teleportation and pauses/restarts of the computer. Yes. As a starting point, these ideas assume the physical supervenience thesis. It does not. At the start it is neutral on this. A computationalist practitioner (knowing UDA, for example) can associate his consciousness with all the computations going through its state, and believe that he will survive locally on the normal computations (the usual physical reality) only because all the pieces of matter used by the doctors share his normal histories, and emulate the right computation on the right level. But the consciousness is not attributed to some physical happening hereby, it is attributed to the infinitely many arithmetical relations defining his possible and most probable histories. Only in step 8 is the physical supervenience assumed, but only to get the reductio ad absurdum. There is no [consciousness] evolving in [time and space]. There is only [consciousness of time and space], evolving (from the internal indexical perspective), but relying and associated on infinities of arithmetical relations (in the 3-view). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 03 Oct 2011, at 00:47, meekerdb wrote: On 10/2/2011 7:13 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:01 AM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. That sounds like a temporal homunculus. :-) Note that on a nanosecond scale there is no state of the brain. Relativity applies to brains too and so the time order of events on opposite sides of your head only defined to within about a nanosecond. The brain is limited for technical reasons, relativity being the least of them. Sure. Action potentials are only few hundred meters/sec. It isn't possible to stop it for a microsecond and restart it at exactly the same state. With a computer you can do this although you are limited to discrete digital states: you can't save the state as logic circuits are transitioning from 1 to 0. But you can do it, and in fact it's implicit in a Turing machine, i.e. an abstract computation. So I'm wondering what consequences this has for Bruno's idea that you are a bundle of computations that are passing through your current state? Some care has to be taken on the wording. With the computational supervenience thesis, you are not a bundle of computations that are passing through your current state, you (1-you) are a person, with referential and self-referential means and that 1-you only supervene on that bundle of computations. Your actions and decisions, through the computational state of the self-referential programs, can select among quite different bundles of computations . You are a living conscious person with partial free will and taxes, and gravitational constraints, and things like that apparently, you can memorize them, make planning, scheduling, etc. As UM knowing we are UMs (like any LUMs) we know we can change ourselves, it is part of our first personhood. The computational states are sharp, discrete things. The brains states are fuzzy distributed things. Brain states are computational states. Just take a Turing machine emulating a brain (at the right level). A crisp computational state can represent a fuzzy brain state, and also can belong to a fuzzy set of crisp state, which is relevant for the 1-p statistics. Fuzzy Turing machine are Turing emulable, like quantum computer are Turing emulable too, despite the extravagant relative slow down that we can suspect. Bruno But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. I think we've discussed this before. It you define them as A, B, C then the lack of content means they don't have inherent order; where as AB, BC, CD,... do have inherent order because they overlap. I don't think this affects the argument except to note that OMs are not the same as computational states. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 10/3/2011 4:48 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 9:47 AM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. I think we've discussed this before. It you define them as A, B, C then the lack of content means they don't have inherent order; where as AB, BC, CD,... do have inherent order because they overlap. I don't think this affects the argument except to note that OMs are not the same as computational states. Do you think that if you insert pauses between a, b and c so that there is no overlap you create a zombie? I have trouble thinking how you would create those pauses. As a classical device a brain or a computer cannot just be stopped and restarted. You have to save all the variable values *and* their first derivatives. The abstraction of what the computer (or brain) does as a Turing computation ignores the derivatives and just considers a sequence of discrete states. In the real computer the CPU clock provides the physical connection between successive states. In the brain it's a lot of distributed action potentials and chemical diffusion in parallel. Of course a computer can emulate what the brain or the simpler computer is doing by simulating all the rates-of-change and intermediate states at some finer level of time and space resolution. You could create pauses in that level of emulation. But those states don't correspond to Observer Moments - something in consciousness. In Bruno's Washington/Moscow thought experiments it seems obvious to me that he would lose some period of consciousness in being transported; e.g. at least 80ms according to Eagleman. So if you teleported every 80ms, you would prevent consciousness. You wouldn't create a zombie though, just an unconscious person. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 10/3/2011 9:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 03 Oct 2011, at 00:47, meekerdb wrote: On 10/2/2011 7:13 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:01 AM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. That sounds like a temporal homunculus. :-) Note that on a nanosecond scale there is no state of the brain. Relativity applies to brains too and so the time order of events on opposite sides of your head only defined to within about a nanosecond. The brain is limited for technical reasons, relativity being the least of them. Sure. Action potentials are only few hundred meters/sec. It isn't possible to stop it for a microsecond and restart it at exactly the same state. With a computer you can do this although you are limited to discrete digital states: you can't save the state as logic circuits are transitioning from 1 to 0. But you can do it, and in fact it's implicit in a Turing machine, i.e. an abstract computation. So I'm wondering what consequences this has for Bruno's idea that you are a bundle of computations that are passing through your current state? Some care has to be taken on the wording. With the computational supervenience thesis, you are not a bundle of computations that are passing through your current state, you (1-you) are a person, with referential and self-referential means I thought you were trying to explain what a person is in terms of arithmetic and computations. Now you seem to be invoking person as a separate entity. and that 1-you only supervene on that bundle of computations. Your actions and decisions, through the computational state of the self-referential programs, can select among quite different bundles of computations . You put select in scare quotes. So are you saying that you select (via free will?) which bundles of computations you supervene on? or which are your most probable continuation? You are a living conscious person with partial free will and taxes, and gravitational constraints, and things like that apparently, you can memorize them, make planning, scheduling, etc. As UM knowing we are UMs (like any LUMs) we know we can change ourselves, it is part of our first personhood. The computational states are sharp, discrete things. The brains states are fuzzy distributed things. Brain states are computational states. Just take a Turing machine emulating a brain (at the right level). A crisp computational state can represent a fuzzy brain state, and also can belong to a fuzzy set of crisp state, which is relevant for the 1-p statistics. Fuzzy Turing machine are Turing emulable, like quantum computer are Turing emulable too, despite the extravagant relative slow down that we can suspect. Yes, I understand that. But brain states are not states of consciousness, i.e. thoughts or observer moments. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
My point is not that a snapshot brain (or computer) state lacks content, but that if it is an emulation of a brain (or a real brain) the snapshot cannot be an observer moment or a thought. The latter must have much longer duration and overlap one another in time. I think there has been a casual, but wrong, implicit identification of the discrete states of a Turing machine emulating a brain with some rather loosely defined observer moments. That's why I thought Eagleman's talk was interesting. Brent On 10/3/2011 8:01 AM, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote: I can't answer for Brent, but my take in this is that what matters is whether the state of the system at any time represents a computation being performed. So, this whole duration requirment is not necessary, a snapshot of the system contains information about what program is being run. So, it is a mistake to think that OMs lack content and are therefore not computational states. Saibal Citeren Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com: On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 9:47 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. I think we've discussed this before. It you define them as A, B, C then the lack of content means they don't have inherent order; where as AB, BC, CD,... do have inherent order because they overlap. I don't think this affects the argument except to note that OMs are not the same as computational states. Do you think that if you insert pauses between a, b and c so that there is no overlap you create a zombie? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 3:58 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 10/3/2011 4:48 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 9:47 AM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. I think we've discussed this before. It you define them as A, B, C then the lack of content means they don't have inherent order; where as AB, BC, CD,... do have inherent order because they overlap. I don't think this affects the argument except to note that OMs are not the same as computational states. Do you think that if you insert pauses between a, b and c so that there is no overlap you create a zombie? I have trouble thinking how you would create those pauses. As a classical device a brain or a computer cannot just be stopped and restarted. You have to save all the variable values *and* their first derivatives. The abstraction of what the computer (or brain) does as a Turing computation ignores the derivatives and just considers a sequence of discrete states. In the real computer the CPU clock provides the physical connection between successive states. In the brain it's a lot of distributed action potentials and chemical diffusion in parallel. Of course a computer can emulate what the brain or the simpler computer is doing by simulating all the rates-of-change and intermediate states at some finer level of time and space resolution. You could create pauses in that level of emulation. But those states don't correspond to Observer Moments - something in consciousness. In Bruno's Washington/Moscow thought experiments it seems obvious to me that he would lose some period of consciousness in being transported; e.g. at least 80ms according to Eagleman. So if you teleported every 80ms, you would prevent consciousness. You wouldn't create a zombie though, just an unconscious person. Computers are turned on and off all the time, saving their last state to disc and taking up where they left off in the computation. Smart phones with solid state drives do this very quickly. There is no reason why a person with an artificial brain couldn't turn on and off every 80ms. If the off interval were short enough an external observer would not notice anything unusual. Would he be a zombie, behaving normally but lacking consciousness? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:01 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. That sounds like a temporal homunculus. :-) Note that on a nanosecond scale there is no state of the brain. Relativity applies to brains too and so the time order of events on opposite sides of your head only defined to within about a nanosecond. The brain is limited for technical reasons, relativity being the least of them. It isn't possible to stop it for a microsecond and restart it at exactly the same state. With a computer you can do this although you are limited to discrete digital states: you can't save the state as logic circuits are transitioning from 1 to 0. But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 4:16 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. I think that you are crossing the limit of your pedagogical use of the physical supervenience thesis. You might be led to a direct contradiction, which might lead to a new proof of its inconsistency. Consciousness cannot be associated with any particular implementation (physical or not) of a computation. It is related to an infinity of computations, structured by the self (or possible self-reference). Nevertheless, you talk about swapping your brain for a suitably designed computer and consciousness surviving teleportation and pauses/restarts of the computer. As a starting point, these ideas assume the physical supervenience thesis. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 10/2/2011 7:13 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:01 AM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. That sounds like a temporal homunculus. :-) Note that on a nanosecond scale there is no state of the brain. Relativity applies to brains too and so the time order of events on opposite sides of your head only defined to within about a nanosecond. The brain is limited for technical reasons, relativity being the least of them. Sure. Action potentials are only few hundred meters/sec. It isn't possible to stop it for a microsecond and restart it at exactly the same state. With a computer you can do this although you are limited to discrete digital states: you can't save the state as logic circuits are transitioning from 1 to 0. But you can do it, and in fact it's implicit in a Turing machine, i.e. an abstract computation. So I'm wondering what consequences this has for Bruno's idea that you are a bundle of computations that are passing through your current state? The computational states are sharp, discrete things. The brains states are fuzzy distributed things. But this doesn't change the argument that, to the extent that the physics allows it, the machine states may be arbitrarily divided. It then becomes a matter of definition whether we say the conscious states can also be arbitrarily divided. If stream of consciousness A-B-C supervenes on machine state a-b-c where A-B, B-C, A-B-C, but not A, B or C alone are of sufficient duration to count as consciousness should we say the observer moments are A-B, B-C and A-B-C, or should we say that the observer moments are A, B, C? I think it's simpler to say that the atomic observer moments are A, B, C even though individually they lack content. I think we've discussed this before. It you define them as A, B, C then the lack of content means they don't have inherent order; where as AB, BC, CD,... do have inherent order because they overlap. I don't think this affects the argument except to note that OMs are not the same as computational states. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Sep 29, 2011, at 8:12 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Suppose your brain paused for 1 us every 99 ms. To an external observer you would be functioning normally; do you think you would be a philosophical zombie? We can change the thought experiment to make the pauses and the duration of consciousness between the pauses arbitrarily long, effectively cutting up consciousness however we want, even if a conscious moment is smeared out over time. I think you missed what I was attempting to say. I agree that it would function normally with the introduction of pauses. Let's say the brain was uploaded and on a computer. The scheduler would do a context switch to let another process run. This would not affect the brain or create a zombie. We could even pause the brain, send it over the wire to another computer and execute it there, without a problem. What I think would be problematic is starting a brain simulation without any prior computational history. I think it might take some minimum amount of time (computation) before that brain could be aware of anything. It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 10/1/2011 2:36 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Jason Reschjasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Sep 29, 2011, at 8:12 AM, Stathis Papaioannoustath...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Jason Reschjasonre...@gmail.com wrote: If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Suppose your brain paused for 1 us every 99 ms. To an external observer you would be functioning normally; do you think you would be a philosophical zombie? We can change the thought experiment to make the pauses and the duration of consciousness between the pauses arbitrarily long, effectively cutting up consciousness however we want, even if a conscious moment is smeared out over time. I think you missed what I was attempting to say. I agree that it would function normally with the introduction of pauses. Let's say the brain was uploaded and on a computer. The scheduler would do a context switch to let another process run. This would not affect the brain or create a zombie. We could even pause the brain, send it over the wire to another computer and execute it there, without a problem. What I think would be problematic is starting a brain simulation without any prior computational history. I think it might take some minimum amount of time (computation) before that brain could be aware of anything. It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. That sounds like a temporal homunculus. :-) Note that on a nanosecond scale there is no state of the brain. Relativity applies to brains too and so the time order of events on opposite sides of your head only defined to within about a nanosecond. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 01 Oct 2011, at 11:36, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Sep 29, 2011, at 8:12 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Suppose your brain paused for 1 us every 99 ms. To an external observer you would be functioning normally; do you think you would be a philosophical zombie? We can change the thought experiment to make the pauses and the duration of consciousness between the pauses arbitrarily long, effectively cutting up consciousness however we want, even if a conscious moment is smeared out over time. I think you missed what I was attempting to say. I agree that it would function normally with the introduction of pauses. Let's say the brain was uploaded and on a computer. The scheduler would do a context switch to let another process run. This would not affect the brain or create a zombie. We could even pause the brain, send it over the wire to another computer and execute it there, without a problem. What I think would be problematic is starting a brain simulation without any prior computational history. I think it might take some minimum amount of time (computation) before that brain could be aware of anything. It's a strange, almost paradoxical result but I think observer moments can be sub-conscious. If we say the minimum duration of a conscious moment is 100ms then 99ms and the remaining 1ms of this can occur at different times, perhaps billions of years of real time apart, perhaps simultaneously or in the reverse order. You would have the experience provided only that the full 100ms even if broken up into infinitesimal intervals occurs somewhere, sometime. I think that you are crossing the limit of your pedagogical use of the physical supervenience thesis. You might be led to a direct contradiction, which might lead to a new proof of its inconsistency. Consciousness cannot be associated with any particular implementation (physical or not) of a computation. It is related to an infinity of computations, structured by the self (or possible self-reference). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 29 Sep 2011, at 21:28, meekerdb wrote: On 9/29/2011 11:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 29 Sep 2011, at 19:24, meekerdb wrote: On 9/29/2011 6:12 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Jason Reschjasonre...@gmail.com wrote: If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Suppose your brain paused for 1 us every 99 ms. To an external observer you would be functioning normally; do you think you would be a philosophical zombie? We can change the thought experiment to make the pauses and the duration of consciousness between the pauses arbitrarily long, effectively cutting up consciousness however we want, even if a conscious moment is smeared out over time. That's true, regarding the brain as a classical computer or as an abstract computation. But those are the points in question. I doubt that it is true regarding the brain as the quantum object it is. It's not clear to me what it would mean in the QM case; freezing the wave function? Use the quantum Zeno effect. Observe its state repetitively. You will project it again and again in its original state. That is one method. That requires constructing an observable that has brain states as its eigenstates. Such an observable is a quasi-classical interaction that entangles the state with the environment via decoherence. So whether consciousness would survive this, is already equivalent to the question of whether you should say 'yes' to the doctor who proposes to replace your brain with a classical computation. That makes my point. Note I was not serious about using that Quantum Zeno effect for freezing an object like a brain. Or, second method, emulate the quantum object evolution on a classical computer, and freeze the classical computer. Does the classical computer obey the 323 principle? Assuming comp, consciousness supervene on the abstract relationship, not on any particular instantiation/emulation. I think such computers don't exist (except in Platonia). But assuming comp, Earth (non-platonia) is an illusion of numbers living in Platonia. So, if you want to preserve both materialism and digital mechanism, you need having real classical computer in which physically inactive parts are playing a physically active role in a computation. That seems nonsensical to me, and if it is sensical, that would be a reason to refuse an artificial digital brain, which by definition preserve consciousness by saving what is relevant for the computation (at some digital level) to be processed. Negating the 323 principle for classical computer introduces some kind of magic in the mind-brain relationship. The UD emulates also the quantum computations. Yes that's another formulation of the same proposition. But I wonder how it emulates the non-interaction experiments. The conventional computation assumes true randomness. In QM-without-collapse, true randomness is a comp first person indeterminacy effect. The UD emulates all non interaction experiments by emulating the global observer+physical devices quantum multiplication effects. If you come back with collapse or true randomness, then quantum computation is no more emulable by classical machine, and you can indeed say no the doctor when he proposes a classical digital artificial brain. But then you have to admit that we are no more Turing emulable. This is just saying that comp, digital mechanism, is false. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Suppose your brain paused for 1 us every 99 ms. To an external observer you would be functioning normally; do you think you would be a philosophical zombie? We can change the thought experiment to make the pauses and the duration of consciousness between the pauses arbitrarily long, effectively cutting up consciousness however we want, even if a conscious moment is smeared out over time. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Sep 29, 2011, at 8:12 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Suppose your brain paused for 1 us every 99 ms. To an external observer you would be functioning normally; do you think you would be a philosophical zombie? We can change the thought experiment to make the pauses and the duration of consciousness between the pauses arbitrarily long, effectively cutting up consciousness however we want, even if a conscious moment is smeared out over time. I think you missed what I was attempting to say. I agree that it would function normally with the introduction of pauses. Let's say the brain was uploaded and on a computer. The scheduler would do a context switch to let another process run. This would not affect the brain or create a zombie. We could even pause the brain, send it over the wire to another computer and execute it there, without a problem. What I think would be problematic is starting a brain simulation without any prior computational history. I think it might take some minimum amount of time (computation) before that brain could be aware of anything. Jason -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 9/29/2011 6:12 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Jason Reschjasonre...@gmail.com wrote: If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Suppose your brain paused for 1 us every 99 ms. To an external observer you would be functioning normally; do you think you would be a philosophical zombie? We can change the thought experiment to make the pauses and the duration of consciousness between the pauses arbitrarily long, effectively cutting up consciousness however we want, even if a conscious moment is smeared out over time. That's true, regarding the brain as a classical computer or as an abstract computation. But those are the points in question. I doubt that it is true regarding the brain as the quantum object it is. It's not clear to me what it would mean in the QM case; freezing the wave function? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 29 Sep 2011, at 19:24, meekerdb wrote: On 9/29/2011 6:12 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Jason Reschjasonre...@gmail.com wrote: If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Suppose your brain paused for 1 us every 99 ms. To an external observer you would be functioning normally; do you think you would be a philosophical zombie? We can change the thought experiment to make the pauses and the duration of consciousness between the pauses arbitrarily long, effectively cutting up consciousness however we want, even if a conscious moment is smeared out over time. That's true, regarding the brain as a classical computer or as an abstract computation. But those are the points in question. I doubt that it is true regarding the brain as the quantum object it is. It's not clear to me what it would mean in the QM case; freezing the wave function? Use the quantum Zeno effect. Observe its state repetitively. You will project it again and again in its original state. That is one method. Or, second method, emulate the quantum object evolution on a classical computer, and freeze the classical computer. The UD emulates also the quantum computations. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 9/29/2011 11:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 29 Sep 2011, at 19:24, meekerdb wrote: On 9/29/2011 6:12 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Jason Reschjasonre...@gmail.com wrote: If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Suppose your brain paused for 1 us every 99 ms. To an external observer you would be functioning normally; do you think you would be a philosophical zombie? We can change the thought experiment to make the pauses and the duration of consciousness between the pauses arbitrarily long, effectively cutting up consciousness however we want, even if a conscious moment is smeared out over time. That's true, regarding the brain as a classical computer or as an abstract computation. But those are the points in question. I doubt that it is true regarding the brain as the quantum object it is. It's not clear to me what it would mean in the QM case; freezing the wave function? Use the quantum Zeno effect. Observe its state repetitively. You will project it again and again in its original state. That is one method. That requires constructing an observable that has brain states as its eigenstates. Such an observable is a quasi-classical interaction that entangles the state with the environment via decoherence. So whether consciousness would survive this, is already equivalent to the question of whether you should say 'yes' to the doctor who proposes to replace your brain with a classical computation. Or, second method, emulate the quantum object evolution on a classical computer, and freeze the classical computer. Does the classical computer obey the 323 principle? I think such computers don't exist (except in Platonia). The UD emulates also the quantum computations. Yes that's another formulation of the same proposition. But I wonder how it emulates the non-interaction experiments. The conventional computation assumes true randomness. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Sep 25, 5:45 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: An interesting talk relevant to what constitutes an observer moment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VQ1KI_Jh1QNR=1 Brent Very cool, thanks for posting. Of course, I think that his observations are entirely consistent with my hypothesis. Our native perception is a large scale view of many lesser scale sensorimotive experiences. The subordinate (from our subjective point of view) phenomena are higher frequency so that the top level awareness exists through a low frequency synthesis or summary of them. It don't think that this occurs localized only to a special, homonculous-like region of the brain, so that it is not a literal summarizing computation, but rather all of the relevant regions of the brain are actively participating on a number of frequency ranges, just like what we do as individuals every day can be summarized by looking at the behavior of an entire population over a longer period of time. What he is reaching for at the end I think is that energy is in fact a subjective experience, and it is through the sensorimotive capacity to signify and sequence it's experience, that the inference of time arises. He is still thinking in terms of there being an actual objective 'now' which our perception lags behind due to computation, but that is not the case. We are not watching the pixels on the screen change, or the screen refreshes, we are watching the images through the screen as a whole, and that happens on a greater scale of time relative to the pixels. It's not just a computational latency, it's a measure of sensorimotive intensity: significance. The qualities he mentions: Brightness Size Numerosity Motion Looming Sequence complexity Number of events Temporal frequence Stimulus visability These are the indicators of subjective significance in visual terms. They are examples experiences with a high volume of sensorimotive intensity. You can look at it as computational latency to process heavier flows of data with more consequences as more neurons are excited, but that is only if you compare the experience to an inanimate object or break the perception down into it's constituent isolated components. These obscure the universal principle at work because the example we are using is this massive human sized experience, sort of like trying to find out how carbonation bubbles work by looking a giant, beach ball sized bubble. Our trillion-neuron psyche is so huge that it warps and distorts and drifts slowly through the air, distracting us from the intrinsic coherence and closure of the bubble. It wobbles and stretches, but it still does what the champagne bubble does most of the time - maintains a coherent inertial frame of perception, a frame from which 'time' arises, not one that keeps up with any kind of external 'time'. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Sep 26, 2011, at 6:31 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 7:45 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: An interesting talk relevant to what constitutes an observer moment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VQ1KI_Jh1QNR=1 Even if the experience is smeared out over time I think it is clear with mechanism that this is the case. Imagine an AI with a single CPU. Here it is obvious that it's state extends through the dimension of time. With the parallel processing of the brain it is less, but still much greater than a Planck time. and has a complex relationship to real world events it could still be the case that it can be cut up arbitrarily. Perhaps arbitrarily in the sense of distinct observer moments, but I don't think so about time. There is no way I can be sure the world was not created a microsecond ago Consider how many CPU cycles are required for the AI to become aware. Even if you think it becomes conscious as soon as the first instruction is executed, the instruction takes some amount of time to complete. If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Jason and there is no way I can be sure there isn't a million year gap between subjective seconds. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On 9/27/2011 3:55 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Sep 26, 2011, at 6:31 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 7:45 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: An interesting talk relevant to what constitutes an observer moment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VQ1KI_Jh1QNR=1 Even if the experience is smeared out over time I think it is clear with mechanism that this is the case. Imagine an AI with a single CPU. Here it is obvious that it's state extends through the dimension of time. With the parallel processing of the brain it is less, but still much greater than a Planck time. Even assuming signals at c the brain extends about a nano-second in time, 22 orders of magnitude longer than the Planck time. But doesn't this create problems for Bruno's argument, which assumes states are timeless, instant like things in Platonia and that they have no overlap. Should we identify observer moments with bundles of UD computations going thru the same state, but also with extensions of those computations forward and backward over some number of states? But they are not the same forward and backward. Or do we require that the substitution level be pushed down to time slices short compared to a nano-second so that an observer moment will be a whole set of states extending over a short time. In which case the sequence of states will pick out a much smaller set of UD computations that went thru all those states. Brent and has a complex relationship to real world events it could still be the case that it can be cut up arbitrarily. Perhaps arbitrarily in the sense of distinct observer moments, but I don't think so about time. There is no way I can be sure the world was not created a microsecond ago Consider how many CPU cycles are required for the AI to become aware. Even if you think it becomes conscious as soon as the first instruction is executed, the instruction takes some amount of time to complete. If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Jason and there is no way I can be sure there isn't a million year gap between subjective seconds. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
My opinion is that quantum mechanics is essential to define an OM, despite it being in the classical domain. The computational state of an AI is not the precise physical state of the system that generates the AI, it is some coarse grained picture of it. So, if you have a classical computer, then the bits that are zero or one only become visible when you average over the microstates. Then, even the observer does not appear at the level of the bits, you need to extract the information that is present in the bits, and there must be a huge redundancy there too. What we are aware of are patterns in the information that enters our brain, but the same pattern we're aware of can be realized in an astronomically large number of ways. Therefore, if you are aware of something right now, the exact quantum state that describes this is, in general, an entangled state which contains the correlations within the patterns that you are aware of and the information present in the environment that are mapped to those patterns. This state defines the program your brain is running, at least as far as rendering the patterns you are aware of. Saibal Citeren meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net: On 9/27/2011 3:55 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Sep 26, 2011, at 6:31 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 7:45 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: An interesting talk relevant to what constitutes an observer moment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VQ1KI_Jh1QNR=1 Even if the experience is smeared out over time I think it is clear with mechanism that this is the case. Imagine an AI with a single CPU. Here it is obvious that it's state extends through the dimension of time. With the parallel processing of the brain it is less, but still much greater than a Planck time. Even assuming signals at c the brain extends about a nano-second in time, 22 orders of magnitude longer than the Planck time. But doesn't this create problems for Bruno's argument, which assumes states are timeless, instant like things in Platonia and that they have no overlap. Should we identify observer moments with bundles of UD computations going thru the same state, but also with extensions of those computations forward and backward over some number of states? But they are not the same forward and backward. Or do we require that the substitution level be pushed down to time slices short compared to a nano-second so that an observer moment will be a whole set of states extending over a short time. In which case the sequence of states will pick out a much smaller set of UD computations that went thru all those states. Brent and has a complex relationship to real world events it could still be the case that it can be cut up arbitrarily. Perhaps arbitrarily in the sense of distinct observer moments, but I don't think so about time. There is no way I can be sure the world was not created a microsecond ago Consider how many CPU cycles are required for the AI to become aware. Even if you think it becomes conscious as soon as the first instruction is executed, the instruction takes some amount of time to complete. If it takes the brain 100 ms to compute a moment of awareness, then you can know you were not created 1 microsecond ago. Jason and there is no way I can be sure there isn't a million year gap between subjective seconds. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: David Eagleman on CHOICE
On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 7:45 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: An interesting talk relevant to what constitutes an observer moment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VQ1KI_Jh1QNR=1 Even if the experience is smeared out over time and has a complex relationship to real world events it could still be the case that it can be cut up arbitrarily. There is no way I can be sure the world was not created a microsecond ago and there is no way I can be sure there isn't a million year gap between subjective seconds. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
David Eagleman on CHOICE
An interesting talk relevant to what constitutes an observer moment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VQ1KI_Jh1QNR=1 Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
