On 28 Feb 2012, at 21:35, Terren Suydam wrote:
On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 2:23 PM, Stephen P. King <stephe...@charter.net
> wrote:
On 2/28/2012 10:46 AM, Terren Suydam wrote:
On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 5:47 AM, Bruno Marchal<marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
When we are dreaming we are in a higher level relative
emulation (all UMs can do that).
That's confusing. I find it hard to believe a bacteria can dream.
The
UM implemented by a bacteria could *potentially* run any program,
but
it is *actually* running the bacteria program. To suggest that
bacteria (e.g. one of the class of "all UMs") can dream by virtue of
being definable as a UM generates more confusion than clarity.
Put another way, if a particularly instantiated UM possesses the
ability to dream (to imagine), then that says something non-trivial
about the constitution of that UM's cognitive architecture.
Terren
Hi Terren,
If a bacterium is a physical system capable of implementing a
universal
Turing machine aka the particular bacteria's program, then Bruno's
argument
shows that it will necessarily be able to dream, for what are
dreams if not
alternative TMs running on the same hardware via dovetailing?
Onward!
Stephen
Dreaming in the context of Bruno's remark means that the running of a
single program could result in alternate 1p realities being
constructed... not that multiple programs could be run in the UM. At
least, that's how I interpret it.
That's correct.
A bacteria is a universal machine in that it can potentially run any
program. However, bacteria as they appear to us run specific programs
(as selected by evolution).
Yes.
Their instantiation as such is a stable
measure relative to us - the shared 1p plural reality. Bacteria that
run programs capable of dreaming (as above), while possible, would
probably count as white rabbits.
... or as stable human beings. After all a human is a sort of bacteria
organization, but of course you need many bacteria. Just one bacteria
is most probably not enough. The genome is not big enough to handle
memories of the type occurring in reasonable notion of dreams. So yes,
that occurs only in white rabbit realities.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
