On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>
> On 03 Jun 2009, at 20:11, Jason Resch wrote:
>
>>
>> On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>> Do you believe if we create a computer in this physical
>>>> universe that it could be made conscious,
>>>
>>> But a computer is never conscious, nor is a brain. Only a person is
>>> conscious, and a computer or a brain can only make it possible for a
>>> person to be conscious relatively to another computer. So your
>>> question is ambiguous.
>>> It is not my brain which is conscious, it is me who is conscious. My
>>> brain appears to make it possible for my consciousness to manifest
>>> itself relatively to you. Remember that we are supposed to no more
>>> count on the physical supervenience thesis.
>>> It remains locally correct to attribute a consciousness through a
>>> brain or a body to a person we judged succesfully implemented locally
>>> in some piece of matter (like when we say yes to a doctor). But the
>>> piece of matter is not the subject of the consciousness. It is only
>>> the "abstract person" or "program" who is the subject of
>>> consciousness.
>>> To say a brain is conscious consists in doing Searle's'mistake when
>>> he
>>> confused levels of computations in the Chinese room, as well seen
>>> already by Hofstadter and Dennett in Mind's I.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for your response, if I understand you correctly, you are
>> saying that if we run a simulation of a mind, we are not creating
>> consciousness, only adding an additional instantiation to a mind which
>> already has an infinity of indeterminable instantiations. Is that
>> right?
>
>
> Yes, you are right. When you implement an emulation of a mind, you are
> just adding such an instanciation relatively to you. Of course you are
> not adding anything in "Platonia".
>
>
But is the computer emulating the mind not also a platonic object? If
the computer simulation does not count toward anything then what is
the point of saying yes to the doctor, or to pursue mind uploading
technology as a method to obtain immortality and escape eternal aging
as QM-immortality would predict?
>
>>
>>
>> Does this imply that it is impossible to create a simulation of a mind
>> that finds it lives in an environment without uncertainty?
>
>
> That is correct.
>
>
>
>> If so is
>> it because even if the physical laws in one instantiation may be
>> certain, where some of the infinite number of computations that all
>> instantiate that mind may diverge and in particular which one that
>> mind will find itself in is not knowable?
>
> Yes. I will come back on this in the seven step thread.
>
>
>>
>>
>> The consequence being that all observers everywhere live in QM-like
>> environments?
>
> Absolutely. We can consider that we "live" in an infinity of
> computations, but we cannot distinguish them ... until they
> differentiate sufficiently so that they are in principle
> distinguishable (like being in Washington or being in Moscow). This
> entails that below our substitution level
> what can be observed depends directly on some average on an infinity
> of computations. The quantum-like aspect of "nature" is, in that
> sense, a consequence of digitalism in the cognitive science. The
> classical, and computational, aspect of physics remains the hard
> things to derive.
>
Interesting, I am curious is there some relationship between ones
substitution level and where one will find the QM uncertainty? If all
observers live in uncertain environments, and it took us this long to
discover QM behavior, I imagine for some observers it could be much
harder or much easier to find this uncertainty level.
What do you think controls how deep one must look to see the QM
behavior first hand? I suppose it might also be related to the
complexity of one's observer moment; the more information one takes in
from the environment and has in memory the lower the level the
uncertainty should be. A God like mind that knew the position of
every particle in the universe in which it lived might not have any
uncertainty, but of course the mind couldn't encode everything about
itself...
Jason
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Received on Thu Jun 04 2009 - 10:51:56 PDT