5 ms·
Materialists just trying to avoid the implications of Wigner's argument.
by yters 7y ago
Materialists just trying to avoid the implications of Wigner's argument.
- jes5199 7y agoWe don’t actually know that human minds can’t be in superposition
- ithkuil 7y agoWhat would the implication be? Do you assume that it's absurd to consider that a conscious being is really no different than any other memory equipped machine and thus can be in a superposition state like anything else without necessarily "feel" anything special about it?
- yters 7y agoConsidering no machines are conscious, yes, it is absurd.
- ithkuil 7y agoNo machines _we know of_ _in the present_ are conscious. Our ignorance about whether that's possible or not is not a proof it's not possible. Besides, why would it matter if the observer is conscious or not? Our psychology is biasing our reasoning about these thing, leading us to attribute something magical to the process that make us "us". It's understandably utterly disconcerting to lose the ground under the sense of self that we inhabit, but that's not a reason to discard, a priori, a line of questioning reality. I know it's hard to shake this uneasy feeling off, even for non-religious people. But let's imagine for a moment that whatever the substance of our consciousness actually is, it can be forked/cloned into copies of itself that no longer share the identity after having been cloned, yet retain the memory of past events (external or internal to itself). I realize this is a bold assumption, but arguably less contentious to accept than whether machines can ever become conscious (perhaps because it sidesteps our innate aversion for outgroups, non-biological entities being extremely outgroup). Now, imagine you fall asleep and get cloned in two, and the two resulting persons are put, still asleep, in two rooms (room 0, and room 1). After an hour they wake up. They both have copies of your memories and both have a copy of whatever-the-thing-that-holds-consciousness is (soul, matter, different kind of "stuff", not really relevant, as long as it's not incompatible with the "cloning postulate"), so in a way, they both think they are _you_; they feel a direct continuity with what they were before falling asleep and getting cloned. They'd have no way to tell which of the two entities they are though. Imagine now being one of them. You get out of the room and peek at the room number on the outside of the door. Which number will you see?
- perl4ever 7y agoWhy would a shared past equal a shared future? I mean, you don't treat twins as though they are a single person, right?
- ncmncm 7y agoSome people do. Dress them the same, even.
- perl4ever 7y agoI would say treating them the same is an affirmation that they are different people. If they really were the same person, nothing would have to be done twice.
- ithkuil 7y agoI'm fact they don't share the future, they only share a starting point, after which they diverge immediately based on influences of the external world, like in this thought experiment the room the particular instance of the clone happens to wake up in. The sequence of thoughts from the moment each clone realizes it woke up in room X, depends on the value of X, which potentially has lasting psychological effects that boost the divergence of the two clones. For example: imagine you've been told that cloning doesn't "split" you in two equally "genuine" clones, buy instead that the first one is the "original" whole the one in room 1 is the "clone". When you wake up and realize you are the clone, your thought process will probably diverge from the original.
- mirimir 7y agoCopy 0 would see 0, and copy 1 would see 1. As soon as the copy was created, it would diverge. But both would have ~equal claim on being "me". > They'd have no way to tell which of the two entities they are though. Not until they learned it from someone authoritative.
- yters 7y agoDoesn't this thought experiment illustrate the absurdity of consciousness cloning? Consciousness cloning is a logical implication of conscious machines. Hence, by modus tollens, machines cannot be conscious.
- perl4ever 7y agoI think people have thought the thought that perhaps everything is conscious.[1] If so, then it doesn't seem that odd to think of a machine being conscious. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
- yters 7y agoPeople have thought there are spirits guiding every process that occurs in the universe, thus it doesn't seem odd to think little invisible gnomes make my computer work.
- mirimir 7y agoHow do you know that we aren't machines? Certainly Occam's Razor implies that we are.
- yters 7y agoHow does Occam's razor imply this?