On 8/05/2017 2:44 pm, Russell Standish wrote:
On Sun, May 07, 2017 at 07:26:02AM +0100, David Nyman wrote:
On 7 May 2017 5:02 a.m., "Russell Standish" <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
Anyway, back to our sheep (as they say in French). Bruno has been
reluctant to really address the question of physical supervenience in
his work. It has to be such consciousness must be about something,
which we may call the environment, or physics, and further that the
mental state must be reflected into that environment to set up a fixed
point that anchors the consciousness into a meaningful
environment. This will manifest as physica supervenience. Otherwise,
the observed environment will collapse into meaningless noise, an
effect I dubbed the Occam catastrophe.
I know Bruno has sometimes talked about fixed points, and what he
calls the "Dxx" trick, but I don't see any real derivation of physical
supervenience in his theories.
Could you remind me how you deal with this issue in TON?
In ToN, I argue on the basis of the Occams razor and the Everything
hypothesis that we're most likely to find ourselves in the simplest
possible universe, namely one that is pretty noisy and devoid of
meaning. This I called the Occam catastrophe - a catstrophe for the
theory as it contradicts empirical evidence of us living in a complex
and meaningful universe.
That idea appears similar to my argument that there is no useful meaning
to the word "consistent" when applied to continuations of computations,
other than that supplied by physical laws.
My solution to the Occam catastrophe was to note that the anthropic
principle required that the universe be compatible with our existence
as an observer,
But computationalism, at that stage, does not entail that any
anthropically viable universe exists! Computationally aware moments need
not be continued in the majority of cases -- we might be Boltzmann
brains, sprung into existence in a sea of white noise, to vanish into
the same sea in the next instant. A completely random universe is thus
completely consistent with our existence as an observer -- maybe not our
continuing existence, which requires physics, not anthropics. Think Last
Tuesdayism!
ie to paraphrase Einstein, the universe must be as
simple as possible, but no simpler. In order for this compatibility to
exist, our conscious selves must be reflected into the observed
universe some how. In order for this reflected self to influence our
consciousness, we need to be self-aware. Hence my prediction, from
which I've never wavered, is that any substantive theory of
consciousness must require consciousness to be self-aware.
I think that insight can be extended to say that we have to be aware of
something in addition to ourselves -- namely our thoughts and memories
of a coherent physical universe. We have to be aware of *something*, and
awareness of merely our awareness does not really work.
The epilogue to this, not appearing in ToN (and the flipside of the
argument, as it were) is that self-awareness requires supervenience on
physics (physics being defined as "what is observed", or
phenomena). If we didn't supervene on our observed world, then how in
hell can be be aware of ourselves.
Exactly.
This might seem like a virtuous circle of logic, but I think that is
only because the real reason why self-awareness is needed hasn't been
elucidated yet.
Conversely, if it can be shown that consciousness is possible without
self-awareness, then the whole Occam catastrophe argument comes to
bite again, implying that we don't, in fact, live in an everything
ensemble, moreover that computationalism is false.
Yes.
Bruce
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