Re: The Game of Life

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon Dec 20 07:46:33 1999

GSLevy wrote:

>Jerry makes the mistake of shifting his coordinate system twice, and this is
>why the paradox that he describes arises.

I agree with Jerry here. What paradox ? What error ?

>
>The first shift in coordinate has to do with 1st and 3rd person.
>Jerry does not see that awareness is a 1st person phenomenon.

I'm not sure that Jerry does not see that awareness is a 1st person
phenomenon.
When Jerry says:

> Are you arguing that a program has to be run before SAS's embodied
> in that program experience consciousness? I totally disagree with
> this approach, which some people call'computationalism'
> (confusingly), don't they?

I guess that he is talking about Jacques Mallah type of physical
 computationalism where there is a need for a "real physical running"
of the machine for consciousness to appear, and so there is a need
for a "real universe" whatever that means.

GSLevy:
>So those
>creature in the universe of Life believe themselves to be conscious ( in the
>first person)

OK.

>but from the Great Programmer perspective (3rd person) or from
>any sophisticated external observer they are not.

Why do you want making these poor little creatures to be
wrong ? And wrong about their own feelings.

How could someone believe to be conscious without being conscious ?
Consciousness is a "pure" first person phenomenon.


You *do* believe in
zombies, don't you ? I mean you think that those creatures are
exactly like us, but that they are unconscious ?

Schmidhuber's, not to talk about Tegmark's, universes, or the little
simple big
everything, all that would be full of creatures believing wrongly they
feel ?

And how could you know you are not among those creatures?

(Of course in the UDA it is an *hypothesis* that those machines are
(relatively) correct.)

\begin{for the modalist}
But even without that hypothesis you can also just modelize the
correcteness
of the machine by []p -> p, or just by consistency <>T.
(Jacques Baihache suggests me that I use [] for the modal box and <> for
the
diamond.) Remeber that [] and <> are interdefinissable: <>p can be seen
as an
abreviation of -[]-p, and []p can be seen as an abreviation of -<>-p)
Remember that in classical propositional logic -p is equivalent to p->F,
so that "[]F - >F" is equivalent to -[]F, which is equivalent to <>T.
 
And let us interview the SRC machine through G and its Guardian Angel G*.
(SRC = self-referentially-correct)
Well the machine seems to remain silent on <>T. The Angel tell us the
machine is correct (G* proves []p -> p), and consistent (G* proves <>T),
and he did tell us that the machine cannot know it, nor justify it
(G* proves -[]([]p->p) and G* proves -[]<>T).
Quite the reverse of you, it seems. The little SRC creature seems a little
bit wiser about what she know.
\end{for the modalist}

This will not convince you, nor is it intended to convince you. Just to
tell
you my opinion and the SRC machine's opinion, and its Guardian Angel's,
opinion. Which is Jerry's opinion too if I
understand and interpret him correctly.


>The second shift has to do with the action of running the program. Before
>the
>computer is started, these creatures in the Life Universe do not exist in
>our
>*time*. Their time is frozen - compared to ours - so from our point of view
>they are not conscious. They are just a bunch of inert bits. When the
>computer runs, their time becomes like ours and now they appear to be
>conscious.

"Running" a machine is a modality which makes sense only relatively
to you. That relative running makes it possible for the machine to
manifest its consciousness relatively to you. It makes possible
to entangled and share computationnal histories. But consciousness per se
is not linked to the dynamical physical activity itself.

>Resolution of this paradox illustrates the relativistic issues in the
>observation process and in particular the relativistic quality of the
>1st/3rd
>person point of view.

I don't understand.


>The relativity of information in terms of mutual
>information as defined by Claude Shannon has deep consequences in physics
>that, I feel, should be explored. In this context, Hawkings has made a major
>breakthrough in the understanding of black holes by relating entropy to
>their
>size.

I agree although I'm not sure to see the relevance here.

Perhaps you are correct on all the points in which case comp should
be wrong (or my reasoning!).

Bruno
Received on Mon Dec 20 1999 - 07:46:33 PST