MGA 2
The second step of the MGA, consists in making a change to MGA 1 so
that we don't have to introduce that unreasonable amount of cosmic
luck, or of apparent randomness. It shows the "lucky" aspect of the
coming information is not relevant. Jason thought on this sequel.
Let us consider again Alice, which, as you know as an artificial
brain, made of logic gates.
Now Alice is sleeping, and doing a dream---like Carroll's original
Alice.
Today we know that a REM dream is a conscious experience, or better an
experience of consciousness, thanks to the work of Hearne Laberge,
Dement, etc.
Malcolm's theory of dream, where dream are not conscious, has been
properly refuted by Hearne and Laberge experiences. (All reference can
be found in the bibliography of my "long thesis". Ask me if you have
problem to find them.
I am using a dream experience instead of an experience of awakeness
for having less technical problems and being shorter on the relevant
points. I let you do the change as an exercise if you want. If you
have understood UDA up to the sixth step, such change are easy to do.
To convince Brent Meeker, you will have to put the environment,
actually its digital functional part in the "generalized brain",
making the general setting much longer to describe. (If the part of
the environment needed for consciousness to proceed is not Turing
emulable, then you already negate MEC of course).
The dream will facilitate the experience. It is known that in a REM
dream we are paralyzed (no outputs), we are cut out from the
environment: (no inputs, well not completely because you would not
hear the awakening clock, but let us not care about this, or do the
exercise above), ... and we are hallucinating: the dream is a natural
sort of video game. It shows that the brain is at least a "natural"
virtual reality generator. OK?
Alice has already an artificial digital brain. This consists in a
boolean tridimensional graph with nodes being NOR gates, and vertex
being wires. For the MEC+MAT believer, the dream is produced by the
physical activity of the "circular digital information processing"
done by that boolean graph.
With MEC, obviously all what matter is that the boolean graph
processes the right computation, and we don't have to take into
account the precise position of the gates in space. They are not
relevant for the computation (if things like that were relevant we
would already have said "no" to the doctor. So we can topologically
deform Alice boolean graph brain and project it on a plane so that no
gates overlap. Some wires will cross, but (exercise) the crossing of
the wires function can itself be implemented with NOR gates. (A
solution of that problem, posed by Dewdney, has been given in the
Scientific American Journal (and is displayed in "Conscience et
Mécanisme" with the reference).
So Alice's brain can be made into a plane boolean graph.
Also, a MEC+MAT believer should not insist on the electrical nature
of the communication by wires, nor on the electrical nature of the
processing of the information by the gates, so that we can use optical
information instead. Laser beams play the role of the wires, and some
destructive interference can be used for the NOR. The details are not
relevant, given that I am not presenting a realist experiment (below,
or later, if people harass me with too much engineering question, I
will propose a completely different representation of the same (with
respect to the relevance of the reasoning) situation, by using the
even less realist Ned Block Chinese People Computer: it can be used
for making clear no magic is used in what follows, with the price that
its overall implementation is very unrealist, given that the neurons
are the chinese willingly playing that role.
So, now, we put Alice's brain, which has become a two dimensional
optical boolean graph, in between two planes of transparent solid
material, glass, and we add a sort of "clever" fluid cristal together
with the graph,in between the glass plates. The fluid cristal is
supposed to have the following peculiar property (which certainly is
hard to implement concretely but which is possible in principle). Each
time a beam of light trigs a line between two nodes, it trigs a laser
beam in the "good" direction between the two optical gates, with the
correct frequency-color (to keep right the functioning of the NOR).
This works well, and we can let that brain work from time t1 to t2,
where Alice dreams specifically, for fixing the matter, that she is in
front of a mushroom, talking with a caterpillar who sits on the
Muschroom (all right?). We have beforehand save the instantaneous
state corresponding to the begining of that dream, so as to be able to
repeat that precise graph activity.
Each time we allow the graph doing the computation corresponding to
the dream (which exists by MEC), the believer in MAT, who believes in
the physical supervenience thesis, has to admit Alice is conscious, in
the sense of having the experience of consciousness of her (non lucid)
dream: she feels herself talking with a caterpillar for example.
Now we film that active graph, with a high resolution camera.
As you have most probably already guess, that film constitutes our
home made "lucky cosmic explosion" generator, corresponding to Alice's
dream experience.
So let us suppose that poor Alice got, again, a not very good optical
plane graph, so that some (1 to many to all, again) NOR gates break
down, in that precise computation corresponding to her dream
experience. And let us project, in real time, with the correct
scaling, the movie we have made, on the graph, playing its role of a
repeatable lucky rays generator.
If Alice remains conscious in MGA 1, through MEC and MAT, Alice
remains conscious in this setting too, all right?
In the ALL gates broken case, we have really, *only a movie* of
Alice's brain activity. Does consciousness arise from the projection
of that movie?
Should a believer in MEC+MAT believes that?
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Fri Nov 21 2008 - 13:33:21 PST