On 3/22/07, Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
No. I'm talking about a sort of program/data division - which I recognize
> is arbitrary in computer program - but I think may have an analogue in
> brains. When I write a simulation of a system of ODEs the time evolution of
> the ODEs define the states. But in the simulation, what actually evolves
> them is passing them to another program that takes them and the current
> state as data and integrates; thus producing a sequence of states. When you
> talk about isolated OMs, what we are conscious of, I think of them as the
> states. They are what we write into memory; they form the "narrative" of
> the simulation. The integrator is like a simulation at a lower level,
> perhaps at the level of neurons. We're not aware of it and in fact many
> different integration algorithms could be used with little difference in the
> outcome (as in the comp idea of replacing neurons with chips). But the
> integrator, even conceived as an abstract 'machine' in Platonia, is
> performing a function, connecting
> one state to the next. I'm not denying that you can simulate all this and
> that you can take a block universe view of the simulation. I'm just saying
> that the block can't be made of just the conscious parts, the OMs, it needs
> to include the unconscious parts that connect the conscious parts.
The integrator is just a device to generate the next state. Perhaps without
it there would be no continuity because there would be no simulation, but if
you had the DE's all solved beforehand you could simply plot the states and
have continuous motion, or whatever it is you are simulating. In any case,
what could it possibly mean for the unconscious part binding my OMs together
to be disrupted? Suppose that this happened every minute on the minute:
would I feel any different? If I did feel different, that would mean my
consciousness was affected, so it would be the OMs that differed, not just
the unconscious part; while if I didn't feel any different by definition my
continuity of consciousness has been maintained and the unconscious
disruption is irrelevant.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Mar 22 2007 - 04:47:50 PDT