I hope you guys will forgive my irreverence, but in the last
couple of hours for the first time I have managed to read this
thread to here. Having done so, and in the spirit of this
everything-list wherein it is assumed everything is not only
possible but _will_ happen and indeed may already have happened
in a universe near you [and of course is that possibility
exists, then it definitely already always has happened], I get
the feeling that comp could lead to madness. But then, of
course, it already has hasn't it ... in another universe
somewhere/when else ... of course ... :-)
The thing is Brent and Stathis have been going around and around
this critical point of duration and continuity for some time
now, without wanting to admit that *our experience of being
aware of being here and now [respectively] is intrinsically
paradoxical*. Well I have felt compelled to that viewpoint for
more than a decade or so now, and I find from reading this
discussion that comp does not solve this. OK, it may well be
that Loebian machines, whether modest or not in other universes,
or just modest but smarter than me - the latter not hard :-) can
get on with the computation of their ontology and somehow
transcend the apparent paradox. The paradox I have thus far
asserted to be primary is the comparatively simple thought that
we are constantly mistaken in taking our experience to be more
or less _all of what is happening_ when it is really only our
brain's construction of its model of self in the world, which is
nothing to sniff at of course but then the processes for doing
this have been scores of millions of years in the making.
Comp makes the whole thing much more Comp-licated! AFAICS under
Comp, we are each and every one of us confined to an anthropic
view which does not even have a consolation that we are
participating in a genuine continuity. Pre-comp, one could
assume that, no matter how deluded one might be, as long as 'I'
am able to be coherent long enough to recognise that it doesn't
make sense to say 'I don't exist' then the chances were very
good that the world is going on independently of me and I have
the chance of really contributing. In a pre-comp universe a wise
person will recognise that, well, things are always what we
believe them to be until we discover otherwise so we have no
guarantee that our attempts to do the right thing are
necessarily the best. However we have a right to believe that so
long as we have tried to sort out the facts of our situation and
purposed not to cause avoidable harm to others then we are being
as ethical as we know how to be and this counts for something
and at least we tried. But with comp, assuming there are no
intrinsic barriers to the formation of worlds and experience
wherein we can come to truly believe we and our world have a
coherent history, we have no reason to assume that this current
experience _and the whole noumenal world we believe to exist_
cannot just wink out of existence. By definition it seems, it
must always be possible that everything we take to be an
indication of duration 'out there' is a transient artefact of
this slice of multiverse.
That is a pretty rugged conception to present to people as
_necessarily_ possible. I therefore take comfort in the
difficulties that people have in integrating Comp into a
coherent explanation of the universe we perceive. I realise that
much can be done with higher mathematics but just because people
can create a formal language system in which algorithmic
processes can be referred to with simple symbols, and sets of
such symbols can be syntaxed together with indicators that mean,
effectively, 'and so on so forth for ever and ever', this does
not mean that the universe outside of peoples' heads can ever
reflect this. I think it behoves contributors here to consider
whether the universal dovetailer can ever be more real than Jack
and his Beanstalk. Jack and his magic vegetable have been around
for a couple of centuries now. The universal dovetailer may do
likewise. We just need to keep in touch with the idea though
that 'It Ain't Necessarily So!'.
Regards
Mark Peaty CDES
mpeaty.domain.name.hidden
http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
> On 3/22/07, *Brent Meeker* <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden
> <mailto: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 Sun Mar 25 2007 - 09:14:16 PDT