[ExI] Quantum consciousness, quantum mysticism, and transhumanist engineering

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Tue Apr 4 23:26:02 UTC 2017


On Wed, 5 Apr 2017 at 12:35 am, Will Steinberg <steinberg.will at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I thought I'd replied to this on mobile but it didn't seem to send, hmm.
>
> What I said was, if a tornado a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away
> assembled a conformation of matter identical to a copy of a book of the
> play 'Hamlet' I own, the former conformation would "not be" Hamlet while
> the copy I have "would be" Hamlet.
>
> To quote "Blowjob" Bill Clinton, "It depends on what the meaning of the
> word 'is' is."  And therein lies our disagreement.
>

With a static object such as a book there is the question of the intention
of the author. It could be that the "Hamlet" book from the Andromeda Galaxy
is actually written in an alien language and if you had the mapping, or
translation, from that language to English you would see that it was in
fact the story of Othello rather than Hamlet. Alternatively, the book might
be full of randomly made marks, and if you had a mapping from these marks
to the text of "Hamlet" you could interpret the book as such. The
information would then not be contained in the book but in the mapping.

These considerations are different for a dynamic entity, a machine or
conscious being, which interacts with its environment. It doesn't matter
how it was made or what the intention of the makers was, and it isn't
possible to arbitrarily map a meaning onto it as in the case of the book.
Its meaning is determined by interacting with it.

It gets more interesting, and more weird, if you consider computations. A
computation can be implemented in any substrate: like the book full of
random markings, any complex system can be mapped to a Turing machine
running any program. Generally this is a trivial observation because such a
system can't be used for useful computation. If the leaves of a tree waving
in the wind can be mapped to a computation of pi, you must already know the
computation and the result in order to determine the mapping.

However, there is a special case to consider: computations which give rise
to consciousness and which do not interact with the external environment.
An example of this would be the computation of a self-contained virtual
world with conscious inhabitants.  In this case, it doesn't make any
difference to the conscious inhabitants that they can't interact with the
substrate in which they are implemented; they are still conscious. So all
around us, there are countless computations - all possible computations -
giving rise to conscious beings with which we can never interact.







-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20170404/bfa7ca56/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list