2009/4/25 Brent Meeker <meeke...@dslextreme.com>: > This implicitly assumes that you can dispense with the continuum and > treat the process as a succession of discrete states. I question that.
So are you saying that, because we are conscious, that is evidence that reality is at bottom continuous rather than discrete? > It is how we think and how we write and describe computer programs and > we know that if we make the time step small enough in the simulation we > can accurately reproduce processes. But I think we are fooling > ourselves by taking the description in terms of discrete states to be > sufficient - actually we are relying on the physics of the computer to > join one state to the next. Bruno proposes to abstract this whole > process up to Platonia where the role of the computer in interpreting > the program is taken over by abstract computations. But then to avoid > any choice he must allow all possible (countably infinite) computations > between any two states. ISTM this implies a strange topology of states > and I'm not clear on how it models consciousness. > >> Or maybe consciousness is only created >> from platonic objects / information or relationships that exist within >> them. The appeal of computationalism for me is that it creates a >> self-interpreting structure, the information or state has meaning only >> because it is part a state machine. We, being creatures who can only >> experience through time might be fooled into thinking change over time >> is necessary for consciousness, but what if we could make a computer >> that computed over the X-dimension instead of T, what would such a >> computer look like and how would it be logically different from a >> recording (which is static over T), and how is it logically different >> from a computer that computes accross the T dimension? >> > > I don't think it is *logically* different. Before computers, a > computation was something written out on sheets of paper (I know because > my first summer job in college was calculating coordinates and depths > for a geological research company and my official job title was > "Computer".) :-) Do you think a computation would feel different from the inside depending on whether it was done with pencil and paper, transistors or vacuum tubes? -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
