Russell Standish writes:
> In fact lets go one further and write a program that prints out all
> combinations of 10^{30} bits in Library of Babel style. This is more
> than enough information to encode all possible histories of neuronal
> activity of a human brain, so most of us would bet this level of
> substitution would satisfy "yes doctor".
>
> So does this mean that the entire library of babel is conscious, or
> the dovetailer program (which is about 5 lines of Fortran) is
> conscious? To me it is an emphatic no! Does it mean that one of the
> 10^{30} length bitstrings is conscious? Again I also say no. The only
> possible conscious thing is the subcollection of bitstrings that
> corresponds to the actions of a program emulating a person under all
> possible inputs. It will have complexity substantially less than
> 10^{30}, but substantially greater than the 5 line dovetailer.
Why do you disagree that one of the bitstrings is conscious? It seems to
me that "the subcollection of bitstrings that corresponds to the actions of
a program emulating a person under all possible inputs" is a collection of
multiple individually conscious entities, each of which would be just as
conscious if all the others were wiped out.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Wed Sep 06 2006 - 21:21:38 PDT