Russell Standish writes:
> If the same QM state is associated with different observer moments,
> you must be talking about some non-functionalist approach to
> consciousness. The QM state, by definition, contains all information
> that can be extracted from observation.
Functionalism explicitly allows that different physical states may implement
the same observer moment. For example, OM1 could be implemented on a
computer running Mac OS going through physical state S1, or by an equivalent
program running on the same computer emulating Windows XP on Mac OS
going through state S2. In this way, there is potentially a large number of
distinct physical states S1, S2... Sn on the one machine all implementing OM1.
Is there any reason to suppose inclusion of a physical state in this set S1... Sn
prevents it from implementing any OM other than OM1? It seems that you would
quickly run out of useful states on a finite state machine if this were so. Perhaps
it would be possible in the case of any state Si to reverse engineer a language
or operating system under which Si is implementing OM1 (I don't know if this
can be shown rigorously), which would mean that any Si implementing another
observer moment OM2 would also be implementing OM1. The conclusion would
be that the relationship between QM states and OMs could be one->many.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Sat Oct 14 2006 - 02:39:35 PDT