Lee Corbin writes:
>But it is *precisely* that I cannot imagine how this stack of
>Life gels could possibly be thinking or be conscious that forces
>me to admit that something like time must play a role.
>
>Here is why: let's suppose that your stack of Life boards does
>represent each generation of Conway's Life as it emulates a
>person. (That Conway's Life can compute anything was discovered
>more than 25 years ago; one may think of it as just a computer
>program, but with an especially appealing visual format in which
>each state is perfectly apparent.)
>
>If a stack of gels like this amounts to the conscious experience
>of an entity, then it certainly wouldn't hurt to move them farther
>apart. So, whereas you may be visualizing them less than an inch
>apart, we may move them without affecting anything to lightyears
>apart.
>
>Next, we alter the orientations of the gels randomly. Finally, we
>see that no particular gel needs to be physically continuous with
>itself---cutting them in half and dispersing them among the galaxies
>changes nothing. In fact, just what kind of changes could the stack
>suffer and *not* be conscious?
>
>(If one buys into Wei Dai's or other descriptions of how Universal
>Dovetailers or other devices (timeless or not) implement actual
>universes, then it can be argued that separating the gels like
>this cuts down on the measure of the OMs they're emulating. It's
>very much as though the effort required to located the scattered
>gels (or scattered atoms making up the gels) contributes to them
>being less "manifest" in some way. But I didn't think that you
>were going there.)
>
>So, for me, since it is absurd to think that either vibrating
>bits of matter (an example Hal Finney quotes) or random patches
>of dust (Greg Egan's theory of Dust) can actually give runtime
>to entities, then I have to draw the line somewhere. Where I
>have always chosen is this: if states, no matter now represented,
>are not causally connected with each other, consciousness does
>not obtain.
If you remember Egan's "dust" theory in Permutation City, you probably also
remember that he did the same manipulations of a computation running in time
as you suggest doing with the Life board stacks in space. Do you not think a
computation would work if chopped up in this way?
The idea that any computation can be implemented by any random process,
given an appropriate programming language (which might be a giant lookup
table, mapping [anything] -> [line of code]) is generally taken as being
self-evidently absurd. The argument goes that that the information content
of the "programming language" must contain all the information the random
system is supposed to be producing, so this system is actually superfluous.
This means we have won no computational benefit by setting up this odd
machine. However, the programming language is only there so that the machine
can interact with the environment. If there is no programming language and
no I/O, the machine can be a complete solipsist. This might occur also if
some future archaeologist finds an ancient computer running an AI, but there
is no manual, no terminal, no keyboard, and nobody knows how it is
programmed any more. If the archaeologist could figure out how to power up
this computer, wouldn't the AI be implemented as per usual?
You might say that in the last example the states were "causally connected",
while in the first they were not. But why should that make any difference,
especially to a solipsist?
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Fri Jul 08 2005 - 11:50:11 PDT