On 1/27/2012 03:27, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Jan 26, 5:52 pm, Russell Standish<li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
On Jan 26, 1:19 am, Pierz<pier...@gmail.com> wrote:
of my own here: no properties can emerge from a complex system that
are not present in primitive form in the parts of that system. There
What about gliders emerging from the rules of Game of Life? There are
no primitive form gliders in the transition table, nor in static cells
of the grid.
There is nothing to the gliders except transitions of the static
cells. The interpretation that there is a visual pattern gliding is
only our perception of it. It's Beta movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_movement
Craig
There is nothing on the display except transitions of pixels. There is
nothing in the universe, except transitions of states (unless a time
continuum (as in real numbers) is assumed, but that's a very strong
assumption). (One can also apply a form of MGA with this assumption
(+the digital subst. one) to show that consciousness has to be something
more "abstract" than merely matter.)
It doesn't change the fact that either a human or an AI capable of some
types of pattern recognition would form the internal beliefs that there
is a glider moving in a particular direction. This belief would even be
strengthened if you increase the resolution of your digital array/grid
by enough, have some high-level stable emergent patterns in it and only
allow "sensing" (either by an external party or something embedded in
it) in an inexact, potentially randomized way (such as only being able
to sense an average of the block, for example, if trying to access an
NxN-sized block, you'd only be able to access a quantized average, and
the offsets being sensed would be randomized slightly) - they would even
prefer to work with a continuum because there's no easy way of
establishing a precise resolution or sensing at that low level, but
regardless of how sensing (indirectly accessing data) is done, emergent
digital movement patterns would look like (continuous) movement to the
observer.
Also, it would not be very wise to assume humans are capable of sensing
such a magical continuum directly (even if it existed), the evidence
that says that humans' sense visual information through their eyes: when
a photon hits a photoreceptor cell, that *binary* piece of information
is transmitted through neurons connected to that cell and so on
throughout the visual system(...->V1->...->V4->IT->...) and eventually
up to the prefrontal cortex. Neurons are also rather slow, they can only
spike about once per 5ms (~200Hz), although they rarely do so often.
(Note that I'm not saying that conscious experience is only the current
brain state in a single universe with only one timeline and nothing
more, in COMP, the (infinite amount of) counterfactuals are also
important, for example for selecting the next state, or for "splits" and
"mergers").
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