Brent Meeker writes:
> >> Suppose that being conscious is something a brain does. Then a
> >> Observer-second would be one second of that brain activity. When
> >> this OS was magically initiated it would already include potentials
> >> traveling down axons, etc, the residue of the previous OS and the
> >> precursors of later milliseconds in this OS. But those underlying
> >> physical processes are not what we generally think of as conscious.
> >> They are not things we would report if asked what we are thinking.
> >> Nevertheless they may be necessary for the continuity of
> >> consciousness, where consciousness here means the inner narrative -
> >> the story I tell myself in my head. In these thought experiments
> >> about OMs there seem to be two contrary implicit assumptions:
> >>
> >> (1) that just the content of the inner narrative constitutes
> >> consciousness, as in the analogy of cutting up a book and then
> >> reconstructing it's order from the content of the segments,
> >>
> >> (2) the feeling of continuity remains in a segment 1sec or 0.1sec
> >> or 0.01sec even if that is too short a segment to allow
> >> reconstruction of the order from the content.
> >
> > I suppose you could say that there is no feeling of continuity from
> > one microsecond to the next in a normally functioning brain either,
> > because it takes many microseconds to make a thought. My point is
> > that whatever it takes to make a thought and however vague the
> > distinction between one thought and the next is, arbitrarily slicing
> > up the physical activity underlying consciousness should not make a
> > difference to the sense of continuity,
>
> But that's exactly the point I find dubious. Continuity in mathematics always involves taking infinite limits in sets that are already ordered (Dedekind cuts for example). And per all our best theories, the universe is instantiates continuous processes in a continuous spacetime. Though there have been many attempts, no one has shown with mathematical rigor how a continuous spacetime can emerge as an approximation of a discrete one. Physicists mostly think it is true, but mathematicians think they're hand waving. The difficulties of numerically solving partial differential equations in computers don't give much comfort.
>
> We use the instantaneous states as in the solution of differential equations, but those generally include the values of derivatives and hence implicitly a time variation.
I'm not sure of your point here. If time is discrete then you can't slice up an
interval smaller than the time quantum, and if it is continuous then you can.
Or are you just saying that it would be very difficult technically to record and
then reproduce a sufficiently accurate copy of a brain at a particular instant in
time in order to ensure that the activity of the copy does not deviate too much
from what the activity of the original would have been given similar inputs?
> >and no explicit ordering is
> > necessary. The counting sequence "one, two, three" may involve
> > millions of slices of brain activity or computer emulation activity
> > spread throughout space and time, and it may take many of these
> > slices to form a moment of consciousness just as it takes many
> > milliseconds of normal brain activity to form a moment of
> > consciousness, but the feeling of continuity should be preserved.
>
> It's the "should" that worries me. If consciousness is just some digital information process that can exist in Platonia, then the underlying continuity of brain processes is irrelevant. But the relevance of brain processes is the point in question. When it is assumed that the conscious thought is not affected by slicing up the physical process, I'm concerned that we are implicitly assuming what was to be proved.
We've debated whether a computer, a recording, the computations in Platonia
etc. can be conscious, but I think we can almost all agree on at least this minimal
functionalism: that if you could copy a person by placing all the atoms in position
accurately enough, then you would end up with a person who looked, behaved,
thought just like the original, had all the original's memories, and identified as being
the original. After all, this sort of thing is happening in our bodies all the time as bits
break off cells and are replaced by identical (or near-identical) parts manufactured by
the automated cellular repair mechanisms. If you accept this idea that the brain is just
a complex machine, I don't see how it is even *logically* possible that a copy of a person
made mid-thought would not experience continuity of consciousness, provided of course
that the technical problems could be overcome and the copy was sufficiently accurate.
It would be like expecting that a perfect copy of an electronic calculator in the middle of
multiplying two numbers would somehow forget what it was doing, or a perfect copy of a
mechanical clock would show a different time or run at a different rate.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Mon Oct 30 2006 - 07:46:20 PST