[ExI] The second step towards immortality

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 5:59 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
>
> [**] I admit, I am not entirely sure anymore. I thought it was obvious,
> but David Chalmers made me doubt whether causal relatedness is actually
> necessary for consciousness or not. If it isn't, then lookup tables might
> be conscious after a fashion. Or the sum total consciousness expressed by
> all possible interactions with the table already exists or existed when it
> was calculated.


### I am quite convinced that GLUTs are compatible with consciousness. The
computational act of "looking up" in a sufficiently exhaustive, idealized
table, one that gives results indistinguishable from interrogating a
physical system, looks very much like a physical process.

Let's posit a GLUT pretending to be a physically embodied human mind. To be
successful, it must be able to coherently answer questions that we answer
only through interactions with our physical surroundings - and
"surroundings" means here any objects that our mind can interact with
through physical effectors. In a way, our biological brain is a part of our
environment because we can literally touch it - thus there is a duality in
the way we perceive its states, the "internal" and "physical". The GLUT
must able to appropriately respond to the following: "Press on your
eyeballs gently through closed eyelids, make round movements with your
fingers. Describe your visual perceptions". To do that, and to correctly
answer all possible physical-brain interaction questions it must embody a
model of the physical brain, fingers, the whole physical world at a very
high level of precision. Searching through that model for arbitrary
physical questions is like physics done on a human body ("What happens if
you apply magnetic field of this shape and strength to your skull at the
standard T3 EEG electrode placement point. Do you feel happiness?
Confusion?") - it isn't just dumb looking up, it is a humongous
computational process, so large you can hide whole elephants there ("What
happens when an elephant weighing 2732 kg applies its left foot to
your...").

I do not know if the universe is a GLUT. My mind bounces off even trivial
issues in computational complexity theory explored in Scott Aaronson's
recent quantum computation book, so don't expect me to weigh in on this
question. But, the answer to the halting problem is out there, in a GLUT we
can't interrogate. So I'd guess there *is* the GLUT of all answers that a
mind could possibly ask for. And that GLUT has all the consciousness that
could possibly exist.

Rafal
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