[ExI] Digital Consciousness

[Gordon]

Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com>  wrote:


>> Do you believe the world is *intrinsically* digital, Giulio? 

> At what level of concern?  You may discern an analog nature 

> of a color wheel.  When you start probing wavelengths of light, 
> you'll find discreteness all the way to quanta of energy 
> related to the working theory of electrons.  Beyond that you 
> return to probability distribution of where/how an electron will exist.

Those probability waves are thought to propagate continuously, so it is not really clear that quantum mechanics tells us that the world is discrete. It only appears discrete when we're measuring it. In any case, the question of discreteness is not exactly what I mean by the question of intrinsic digital-ness, and quantum mechanics makes my brain hurt.

> So is the world *intrinsically* any particular way?  I don't think we
> can answer that without first defining a lot of parameters that
> eventually forces the answer to depend on those parameters.

If the world is intrinsically digital then at its most basic level it is made out of something comparable to on/off switches. I don't believe that to be the case, but if it were so then it might be fair to say that everything including the brain is a digital computer.

Gordon
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