Bruno Marchal wrote:
> 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
I think yes. Although one might quibble about the "arise" part. The specific
pattern, which was not generated but merely copied by the movie, arose from
Alice's life experience - with mushrooms, caterpillars, etc. It's
meaning/interpretation comes from the external world.
Brent
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Fri Nov 21 2008 - 14:22:55 PST