Re: The Sim's of Platonia ( was: Everything Physical is Based on Consciousness)

From: CMR <jackogreen.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sat, 07 May 2005 11:38:19 -0700

Greetings Steven,

With due respect and paraphrasing Dawkin's paraphrasing of someone else,
"your incredulity is not a convincing measure of a idea's validity" at
least not in an objective sense. Nor is mine either, but I wonder if
Davies is not on to something when he posits that "strong emergent"
phenomena that congeal at various levels of complexity - like
consciousness? - may be inexplicable via existing physical "laws".;
this because, like Wolframs "strong digitalist" pseudo-random
generators, such phenomena are effectively algorithmically
"incompressible" given time and resource constraints. Davies cites
Lloyd's "softer digitalism" in his estimate of the Landauer-Lloyd limit
on the computational capacity of "this" universe given light's speed
limit and concludes that, although such phenomena may not be purely
random, there's not enough functionally available computing capacity
exploitable by Laplace's demon to unravel them. Therefore Davies
suggests a new set of principles may well need to be coined regarding
such strong emergent processes. The "mechanics" of consciousness may
indeed be a case in point and the attempt to "crack" it's code with
existing physical principles the wrong tools for the right job.

Now before we go further, this of course assumes the computational
resources of other "parallel" universes, assuming they exist at all, are
just as exploitively isolated as those beyond the Landauer-Lloyd limit;
a big if, I agree. But one that remains prohibitive in absence of any
solid evidence to the contrary IMHO.

To quote Davies: "If the micro-laws - the laws of physics as we know
them - cannot completely determine the future states and properties of
some physical systems, then there are gaps left in which higher-level
emergent laws can operate"

Cheers

Stephen Paul King wrote:

> Dear Brian,
>
> Don't we first have to establish that strings of ones and zeros can
> encode all of the basic structure that we would agree are necessary
> for consciousness? I still do not understand how one bitstring can
> encode necessity of the illusion of making a choice between eating
> Apples or Oranges and I still have had no explanation of how one
> bitstring can interact with no kind of change and permanence in change
> possible.
>
> Stephen
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian Scurfield"
> <brian.scurfield.domain.name.hidden>
> To: <Fabric-of-Reality.domain.name.hidden>
> Cc: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>; "'Stephen Paul King'"
> <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
> Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2005 6:25 AM
> Subject: The Sim's of Platonia ( was: Everything Physical is Based on
> Consciousness)
>
>
> snip
>
>>
>> OK, let's suppose we are sim's of Platonia. In particular, let's suppose
>> that us and the world around us are represented by the computational
>> histories of Platonic Turing Machines.
>>
>> When a TM that supports a sim "executes" steps (quotes cause we're in
>> Platonia), the contents of its tape change and the read-write head moves
>> (I'll spare you the quotes on change and move). When we look at a
>> snapshot
>> of the tape, what is on that tape are zeroes and ones (of course,
>> Platonia
>> doesn't care whether its apples and oranges on the tape). We are
>> represented
>> by some of those zeroes and ones. As you have noted, those zeroes and
>> ones
>> will contain records of what happened in prior snapshots on the tape.
>> There
>> will also be records of our thoughts and beliefs. Some of those
>> beliefs will
>> be of time and some of consciousness. The snapshot, however, is totally
>> static; it in itself does not support consciousness, it is just ones and
>> zeroes. Similarly the next snapshot is static and the glue that holds
>> the
>> two snapshots together can be totally described by a static
>> bit-string which
>> encodes the TM.
>>
>> It does not seem like we can find our first person experience in
>> this; it's
>> all just zeroes and ones! Apples and oranges even. But that's just
>> incredulity. I think the pertinent question to ask is: why do
>> sequences of
>> zeroes and ones on the tape develop the belief of consciousness?
>>
>> Brian Scurfield
>>
>
>
>
Received on Sat May 07 2005 - 14:42:44 PDT