On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 11:59:55 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: > > On 9/4/2012 9:48 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > Taking another look at Sane2004. This isn't so much as a challenge to > Bruno, just sharing my notes of why I disagree. Not sure how far I will get > this time, but here are my objections to the first step and the stipulated > assumptions of comp. I understand that the point is to accept the given > definition of comp, and in that respect, I have no reason to doubt that > Bruno has accomplished what he sets out to as far as making a good theory > within comp, and if he has not, I wouldn't be qualified to comment on it > anyhow. From my perspective however, this is all beside the point, since > the only point that matters is the actual truth of what consciousness > actually is, and what is it's actual relation to physics and information. > Given the fragile and precious nature of our own survival, I think that > implications for teleportation and AI simulation/personhood which are > derived from pure theory rather than thorough consideration of realism > would be reckless to say the least. > > > Hi Craig, > > Excellent post! >
Thanks Stephen! > > > *Step one* talks about teleportation in terms of being reconstructed with > ambient organic materials. If comp were true though, no organic materials > or reconstructions would be necessary. The scanning into a universal > machine would be sufficient. > > Yep, the assumption is that the function that gives rise to Sense is > exactly representable as countable and recursively enumerable functions. > The trick is finding the machine configuration that matches each of these. > That's where the engineers come in and the theorists go out the door. > That seems to be the hypocrisy of comp - it assumes that function is enough, that all-but-computation is epiphenomena, but then wants to bring it back home to the material universe to claim the prize. It makes me think of the self-help guru who preaches that money doesn't make you happy in a best-selling book. > > Taking this to the China Brain level, the universal machine could be a > trillion people with notebooks, pencils, paper, and erasers, talking to > each other over cell phones. This activity would have to collectively > result in the teleported person now being conjured as if by incantation as > a consequence of...what? The writing and erasing on paper? The calling and > speaking on cell phones? Where does the experience of the now disembodied > person come in? > > > The "person" rides the computation, it is not "located" any particular > place. But all this is predicated on the condition that consciousness is, > at its more rubimentary level, nothing but countable and recursively > enumerable functions. THe real question that we need to ask is: Might there > be a point where we no longer are dealing with countable and recursively > enumerable functions? What about countable and recursively enumerable > functions that are coding for other countable and recursively enumerable > functions? Are those still "computable"? So far the answer seems to be: > Yes, they are. But what about the "truth" of the statements that those > countable and recursively enumerable functions encode? Are they countable > and recursively enumerable functions? Nope! Those are something else > entirely! > Right. Something about microelectronics and neurology though that blinds us to the chasm between the map and the territory. This kind of example with pencil and paper helps me see how really bizarre it is to expect a conscious experience to arise out of mechanism. I guess it's just Leibniz millhouse but really...say we have the code for the experience of the memory of the smell of pancakes. We have a trillion people furiously scribbling on notepads, talking to other scribblers on the phone, passing information, calculating stuff. We introduce this pancake code by calling 350,000 of them on the phone and issuing this code, and they all write it down, add it to the other numbers and addresses and whatnot, make thousands of phonecalls to other people who are also writing this stuff down and adding numbers with their special decoder rings, etc. So why and how does this pancake smell come into play? If we assume that this is possible that the pancake smell is actually conjured in some way for some reason we can't imagine, then doesn't it open the doorway to disembodied spirits everywhere? We wouldn't need a whole Boltzmann brain to conjure a ghost or a demon, just some Boltzmann bits and seeds. To me it only makes sense that we are our whole life, not just the brain cells or functions. The body is a public structural shadow of the private qualitative experience, which is an irreducible (but not incorruptible) gestalt. > > Step one talks about annihilation as well, but it is not clear what role > this actually plays in the process, except to make it seem more like > teleportation and less like what it actually would be, which is > duplication. If I scan an original document and email the scan, I have sent > a duplicate, not teleported the original. > > > Notice that both the duplication and the teleportation, as discussed, > assume that the information content is exactly copyable. This is not qubits > that are involved... The point here is that this comp model assume that > Reality is, at is ground level, classical. This is where my head starts > spinning <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO9FD7zI7k0> with Bruno's > ideas.... > > haha, yes, well Bruno does warn about vertigo in the paper. > > I have problems with all three of the comp assumptions: > > *yes, doctor*: This is really the sleight of hand that props up the > entire thought experiment. If you agree that you are nothing but your brain > function and that your brain function can be replaced by the functioning of > non-brain devices, then you have already agreed that human individuality is > a universal commodity. > > > Ummhummm, but it is! Why is that is so amazing?! Out notion of > individuality is tied to the "autonomously moving and detecting and feeding > and reproducing" machine that our minds inhabit! Why does its precise > constitution matter? > In theory it shouldn't matter, but that's the problem, in reality it does matter and it matters a lot and in thousands of different ways. The constitution is exquisitely specific about how it handles arsenic, LSD, and Cheerios. Everything that feeds feeds on water and oxygen and glucose. > All that matters is that it can "exactly" carry our the necessary > functions. Individual minds are just different "versions" of one and the > same mind! To steal an idea from Deutsch, Other histories are just > different universes are just different minds... The hard question is: How > the hell do they get synchronized with each other? > I think they are synchronization itself to begin with. The question to me is, how do they get de-synchronized, and I think it's by introducing latency on a borrowed-as-space basis. > We know that the synchronization cannot exist "ahead of time", simply > because that is a massive contradiction! > Why? If everything is a singular totality on one level, then synchronization is the precondition of time. Time is nothing but perspective-orchestrated de-synchronization. > What if the synchronization is just "accidental" (like Bruno proposes)? > Well, not sure about how that would solve the problem! Why? Because the > chances of an "accidental" synchronization of an arbitrarily long sequence > of matchings between arbitrarily many minds (each defined in terms of > infinitely many computations intersecting) is vanishingly small. It is > exactly zero! "Huston, We Have A Problem!" > There could and would be multiple octaves and resonance artifacts due to the accidental re-synchronizations (which feed back on the original pre-synchronization at zero point). This is where living organisms come in...stuff that has fallen apart to such an extent that it begins to put itself back together on a higher octave...making opportunities for meta-feedback. > Benjayk et al are posting about a related subject in the thread: RE: > Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence It is all > focused on the problem of the axiom of choice and constructability. I think > the problem can be recast as a computational complexity problem, but I have > been known to be not even wrong on occasion. My evidence is that the > limitation that we see in the real world on computers is the scarcity of > resources, which is why P does not equal NP IMHO. Without an eternally and > exponentially expanding supply of resources (or tape), the UD simply cannot > be run. Not even one step! > Might this be just a form of an imperative on the existence of an > endless supply of universes with exponentially expanding resources? Isn't > this exactly what we observe in the star filled heavens? Maybe we finitely > exist because we must, or else existence would contradict itself and vanish > (like that Penguin in the Bloom County cartoon). Resources must exist for > the computations to occur. We are God's thoughts. > > > Yeah, I don't know, any kind of universe-as-machine cosmology seems no better than a theological cosmology. What machine does the machine run on? What meta-arithmetic truths make arithmetic truths true? > > *Church thesis*: Views computation in isolation, irrespective of > resources, supervenience on object-formed computing elements, etc. This is > a theoretical theory of computation, completely divorced from realism from > the start. What is it that does the computing? How and why does data enter > or exit a computation? > > > It is an ontological theory that seeks to explain the appearance of > "reality", thus it is meta-realism. > It doesn't find a purpose for realism though, so it seems like an unrealism to me. > > *Arithmetical Realism*: The idea that truth values are self justifying > independently of subjectivity or physics is literally a shot in the dark. > Like yes, doctor, this is really swallowing the cow whole from the > beginning and saying that the internal consistency of arithmetic > constitutes universal supremacy without any real indication of that. > Wouldn't computers tend to be self-correcting by virtue of the pull toward > arithmetic truth within each logic circuit? Where do errors come from? > > > That's the right question to be asking! Errors are sentences that are > false in some code. Exactly how does this happen if one's beliefs are > predicated on Bp & p(is true)? > Yeah, it seems to me like we should have to be spraying cybercide all over the place to prevent supercomputers from springing up in the vacuum flux or the sewer systems of large cities. Craig > > -- > > > -- > Onward! > > Stephen > http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/hWponxeQA5MJ. 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.
