Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 18/02/2008, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[snip]
But again, none of this touches upon Lanier's attempt to draw a bogus
conclusion from his thought experiment.
No external observer would ever be able to keep track of such a
fragmented computation and as far as the rest of the universe is
concerned there may as well be no computation.
This makes little sense, surely. You mean that we would not be able to
interact with it? Of course not: the poor thing will have been
isolated from meanigful contact with the world because of the jumbled up
implementation that you posit. Again, though, I see no relevant
conclusion emerging from this.
I cannot make any sense of your statement that "as far as the rest of
the universe is concerned there may as well be no computation." So we
cannot communicate with it anymore.... that should not be surprising,
given your assumptions.
We can't communicate with it so it is useless as far as what we
normally think of as computation goes. A rainstorm contains patterns
isomorphic with an abacus adding 127 and 498 to give 625, but to
extract this meaning you have to already know the question and the
answer, using another computer such as your brain. However, in the
case of an inputless simulation with conscious inhabitants this
objection is irrelevant, since the meaning is created by observers
intrinsic to the computation.
Thus if there is any way a physical system could be interpreted as
implementing a conscious computation, it is implementing the conscious
computation, even if no-one else is around to keep track of it.
Sorry, but I do not think your conclusion even remotely follows from the
premises.
But beyond that, the basic reason that this line of argument is
nonsensical is that Lanier's thought experiment was rigged in such a way
that a coincidence was engineered into existence.
Nothing whatever can be deduced from an argument in which you set things
up so that a coincidence must happen! It is just a meaningless
coincidence that a computer can in theory be set up to be (a) conscious
and (b) have a lower level of its architecture be isomorphic to a rainstorm.
It is as simple as that.
Richard Loosemore
-------------------------------------------
singularity
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