[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

[Anders Sandberg]

On 29/04/2013 19:34, spike wrote:
> So even if we define a crayon as any
> atom or any combination of atoms, the number of possible crayons is the
> number of combinations of 10^48, which is finite.  Reaaaaaly really big, but
> finite.
Of course, the positions might still be continous and could in principle 
change colors (through diffraction, for example. I want diffraction 
color crayons!)


> If you meant to ask, is the number of colors finite, I could argue this is
> infinite, since a color can be defined as an arbitrarily small increment in
> frequency of light reflected in any combination.  I would argue this is
> infinite, even if our perception of these colors in finite.

The just noticeable perceptual difference of color is not that small, 
although specifying it is complicated due to the nonlinearities of 
nearly everything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_difference
But notice the MacAdam diagram at the bottom:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAdam_ellipse
I would guess the full diagram would be covered by a few hundred such 
ellipses of indistinguishable colors. So the number of colors you can 
see is likely on the order of a few thousand or so, if we count darker 
and brighter versions too.


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University