An excerpt from "Awareness Lies Outside Turing's Box" by Michael Manthey
**Act I*. A man stands in front of you with both hands behind his back. He shows you one hand containing a coin, and then returns the hand and the coin behind his back. After a brief pause, he again shows you the same hand with what appears to be an identical coin. He again hides it, and then asks, “How many coins do I have?” ** * Understand first that this is not a trick question, nor some clever play on words - we are simply describing a particular and straightforward situation. The best answer at this point then is that the man has “at least one coin”, which implicitly seeks *one bit* of information: two possible but mutually exclusive states: *state1* = “one coin”, and *state2 *= “more than one coin”. One is now at a decision point - *if *one coin *then *doX *else *doY - and exactly one bit of information can resolve the situation. Said differently, when one is able to make this decision, one has *ipso facto* _received_ one bit of information. **Act II*. The man now extends his hand and it contains two identical coins. * Stipulating that the two coins are in every relevant respect identical to the coins we saw earlier, we now know that there are two coins, that is, *we have received one bit of information*, in that the ambiguity is resolved. We have now arrived at the demonstration’s dramatic peak: **Act III*. The man asks, “Where did that bit of information come from?” * Indeed, where *did *it come from?! The bit originates in the *simultaneous presence* of the two coins - their *cooccurrence* - and encodes the now-observed *fact *that the two *processes*, whose states are the two coins, respectively, do not exclude each other’s existence when in said states. Thus, there is information in (and about) the environment that *cannot *be acquired sequentially, and true concurrency therefore *cannot *be simulated by a Turing machine. Can a given state of process a _exist simultaneously_ with a given state of process b, _or_ do they _exclude_ each other’s existence? In concurrent systems, *this* is the fundamental distinction. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tc33b8ed7189d2a18-M55a127306c5bb18333aa528f Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
