Thursday, June 2, 2016

comment on consciousness

Interesting that someone who believes in quantum mysticism would defend traditional computational views. His escapades regarding an open universe depend on neither something causing the universe to re-collapse, nor there being a physical way for intelligent entities to remold the universe such that its spatial configuration changes. In any case fundamental unpredictability rests on true randomness, which is magic, and can't reasonably be taken seriously. There are an infinite number of irrational numbers, there's also a finite number of possible configurations of the universe, it doesn't matter what sequence of actions you do, there's a number which represents that exact sequence from birth to death, it is was and ever will be, it thus serves as a perfect prediction of whatever it is you've done and will do for the rest of your life, it exists out there. Likewise there's a prediction for the evolution of the entire planet in existence somewhere out there, there are predictions for any possible sequence of events.
Still I found the whole idea of bringing quantum phenomena into this to be unacceptable. Consciousness has content, it has correspondence with macroscopic phenomena, saying that if in someway we made it predictable it would suddenly not be conscious despite being causally and physically identical seems nonsensical and superstitious.
Here's the thing, we have no reason to believe that consciousness can't expand or contract while retaining uniqueness of identity, so we have additional tissue that will acquire identity and tissue that will lose identity depending on the case... While a hypothesis, I believe it might even be possible to connect two brains such that they share one identity, if this actually is the case, there would be no reason to suppose that separate identities are nothing more than an illusion given by limitations of nonshared memory.
As for computers, it is said that universality is possible with just addition and branching. Meaning that basically moving from one number to another is enough to replicate all possible computations. That suggests that whatever is consciousness likely resides not in the process of computation, that is equivalent to moving from place to place and performing addition, but in the actual patterns embodied by the numbers themselves. We already know that depending on the way you analyze a number quite a variety of possible interpretations are possible. There are interpretations that basically emerge out of it with minimal or simple analysis, other interpretations might require more elaborate analysis, in some sense depending on the procedure the procedure itself might introduce what you're looking for. A question is can we say that the pattern contains an essence, some information? is the mere presence of patterns enough to correspond and contain consciousness itself? or is there a physical process or phenomena, perhaps uncomputational that actually manifests as conscious sensation?
Basically every sensory modality is likely encodable in digital form, no reason to doubt this, and from digital form connected to the brain expressible as qualia. Does this process of brain activity add something more, something fundamental? I've doubts about that, and also about anyone who considers true randomness as something that is sensible.
so too I can declare, “give me a big enough computer and the relevant initial conditions, and I’ll simulate the brain atom-by-atom.” The Church-Turing Thesis, I said, is so versatile that the only genuine escape from it is to propose entirely new laws of physics, exactly as Penrose does—and it’s to Penrose’s enormous credit that he understands that.
That was a nice comment. What people have to understand is that the only things that don't truly need an explanation to exist are the abstract, the truths, the patterns. The idea that something could come from nothing seems nonsensible. Only something that is eternal, and something that is equivalent to nothingness can actually exist, something like truth.
Some people will object to platonic ideas, but in the end mathematics is discovered not created, you may choose arbitrary rules like an author chooses arbitrary words but the set of combinations of patterns is finite, the patterns already exists in myriad numerical sequences, only the length along dimensions varies, and this infinity often merely results in endless repetition of the finite in different orderings.
A simulation need no explanation to exist, the entire sequence of patterns can exist at the same time atemporally. Trying to bring notions such as free will and true randomness in just results in nonsense.
Regards predictability what you have to ask is whether what you did yesterday is predictable to you today, of course it is, and can be easily verified by taking a live camera around. You have to say the nature of the present and future are fundamentally different from the past, and that there is some mechanism or phenomena that transitions between them and fundamentally changes the nature of one to that of the other, such that future becomes present becomes past.
On the other hand a block time view based on simulation only requires that some pattern exist as a possibility, and it simply is with all its glory.-link

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