On Apr 22, 2:02 pm, Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> I was with you up to that last sentence. Forward or backward, we just
> experience increasing entropy as increasing time, but that doesn't
> warrant the conclusion that no process is required and an "instant"
> within itself has an arrow of time.
It seems to me that each instant DOES contain within itself an arrow
of time, in the form of memories. Later instances are related to
earlier instances by virtue of having memory-information about those
earlier instances. That's what ties the various "states" together.
The nature of the computations that might transition you from instant
to instant are not relevant.
What matters is where you end up, not how you got there. If a
transition causes you to assume a state that contains no information
about earlier events (i.e., no memory of these events), then you have
lost a crucial part of what makes you who "you" are.
If you save your brain state at time A and then you save state again
at a subsequent time B, there is a relationship and an objectively
measureable degree of correlation between the information contained in
the two saved data sets.
It is, I think, the degree of correlation between states that provides
the illusion of a "flow" of consciousness. This has nothing to do
with the type of computation that could be used to "transition"
between the two data sets.
Again, it seems to me that the arithmetic logic that Bruno refers to
just serves to "describe" the relations between datasets. It doesn't
"produce" consciousness.
If there are many "algorithms" that could be used to transition from
state A to state B, it seems to me that all of them would produce the
same conscious experience. If you end up at "state B", then it
doesn't matter how you go there...your "memory" of the experience will
be identical regardless of what path you took.
And since all states (not just A and B) exist platonically, then every
possible "process" can be "inferred" to connect them in every possible
way. But I don't think this means that the processes are the source
of consciousness. They are just descriptions of the ways that states
could be connected.
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Received on Thu Apr 23 2009 - 17:37:53 PDT