Re: Conscious States vs. Conscious Computations

From: Russell Standish <lists.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:09:55 +1000

On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 02:12:11PM -0700, "Hal Finney" wrote:
>
> My guess is that sufficiently long, meaningful data strings have
> their meaning implicitly within themselves, because there is no
> reasonable-length program that can interpret them as anything else.
>
> Hal Finney
>

This is patently false, as otherwise unbreakable ciphers would not
exist. The "anything else", of course is junk.

However, it does seem to be true that not all strings are capable of
being interpreted as an observer moment of a conscious observer. This
is kind of a flip side of what you're saying. I'm not aware of this
being proven, though, or even the similar (and weaker under COMP)
statement that not all strings are capable of being interpreted as
self-describing Turing machine. Note that this feeds in Chalmers
conscious rocks argument.

Cheers

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Received on Wed Sep 26 2007 - 21:02:52 PDT