I don't quite follow your argument. OMs are not computations. Whatever
they are under computationalism, they must be defined by a set of
information, a particular meaning to a particular observer.
Quantum states have this property. For observables that the state is
an eigenvalue of, the state contains precise information about those
observables. For observables that the state is not an eigenvalue of,
there is still information about relative proportions of different
outcomes of measurement.
If I understand your argument correctly, you say that 1 string of bits could
be interpreted in multiple ways by multiply different observers. This
is true regardless of whether we accept computationalism. But you
can't associate quantum states with uninterpreted strings - each quantum
state is an interpretation.
Perhaps where some confusion lies is when we use a quantum state to
refer to a subsystem of the universe, eg that experiemental apparatus
over there on the lab bench. This is the typical situation in QM
calculations. What this state is is the projection of the full QM
state onto the subspace of interest (the apparatus) with all other
dimensions summed over ("traced out" in mathematical parlance). In
this case, this projected QM state describes not a full observer
moment, but only a component of one. And of course there will be
multiple observer moments sharing that component.
Cheers
On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 04:39:17PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
> 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 - 23:02:11 PDT