On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 11:19:47AM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> 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
It is simply the absurdity of a recording being conscious. I know we
are on opposite sides of that fence. The question is whether you can
see a difference between one and the other.
To recap - there are three things being talked about here:
1) The set of all strings, which can be generated by a dovetailer or
similar simple program
2) A single string capturing the trace of a conscious observer in a
single history, which whilst enormously complex itself, can be
played back by a trivial program, or by Maudlin's construction a
counterfactual handling device in which only the trivial playback
device is active.
3) A set of strings corresponding to the trace of a conscious observer
over all possible histories. This can only be generated by a
program equivalent to the original observer, however I suppose it
can be stored (since it is still finite) on a vastly longer tape
(2^{complexity observer=10^15 (say)} bits) and played back using a
dovetailer. In fact one way of doing this might be to use a
2^{10^30} length tape, and mark a 1 for all those traces generated
by the original observer, and 0 for those that are not. Then the
dovetailer can do a simple search on this immense tape to see
whether a particular branch appears as a prefix to the binary
expansion of any of the conscious traces. Then one can do a
Maudlin-type argument. However, even this construction will fail in
the presence of subjective immortality (eg QTI or
COMP-immortality).
So the question is 1), 2) or 3) conscious. I would argue only 3) is,
particularly with immortality. I'll leave this thread for now - I have
some more ideas based on physicality being phenomenal, which rules out
a Maudlin-like construction of the 1) (and possibly 3) case.
Cheers
--
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 R.Standish.domain.name.hidden
Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
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Received on Wed Sep 06 2006 - 22:07:03 PDT