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

[Colin Hales]

This is so messed up.

It's turned into a strategic first-entrant advantage for me.

And I can scream my answers from rooftops: My IP is rendered safe by the
self-misdirection of several generations of entire science disciplines.

Thomas Kuhn describe these cuspy eras in science. Time after time in
science. Phlogiston. Earth centric universe etc etc etc.

What he didn't convey was what it was like to be inside one. Dammit I'm so
over it.

This one is a result of a mistake that could only be made when computers
were invented!

It's the big one. It has shut down a whole era in science. It has literally
broken empirical science practice.

It's amazing. It's like a cult that none of you know you're in. You're all
absolutely convinced of something that can only be conclusively proved by
assuming it is false, not using computers and testing  --- .... which is
science practice none of you have never done because it's your job to use
computers! You think it's empirical science when it isn't.

Not sure who I'm ranting at any more. Forget it.




On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 9:26 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> 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
>
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>
>
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