4 ms·

Your consciousness, which is likely not local.

thewakalix 5y ago
Wow, a real-life dualist? How do you reconcile this view with the findings that various mental operations correspond directly to processes occurring in the brain? Doesn't it seem an odd coincidence that a simple "gateway" also contains everything it would need to do the work itself, without a gateway?
- jakear 5y ago
  Not the parent and not a “dualist”, but I sometimes like to engage in thought experiments comparing us to intelligent entities on a webpage that have been given access to a REPL on their current context: We discovered document.body.innerHTML (dna?), and perhaps have found a way to establish a debugger connection too (eeg/ekg/etc?). We can see that various sequences of token inputted to the REPL correspond to reproducible outputs (gene engineering), but we have no real understanding how it all works under the covers. That is, we don’t know anything of the miles of renderer/OS/hardware/physics stack that makes it all possible. Importantly to this discussion, we don’t know anything about a funny little sequence called XMLHttpRequest. We see it all over the place and can easily see how particular behaviors correspond to the sequence being invoked, but as far as we can tell it doesn’t act all that differently to any of the other token sequences we test, being perhaps most similar to Math.random, with the exception that it takes a seed as input.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I don't really have an opinion on the subject, but I do think this argument you are making isn't all too convincing. Hypothetical scenario: Imagine if we hadn't discovered the medium of air. Yet we have discovered that putting a sail on a boat makes it randomly push the boat forward. In that case, we could explain the mechanics of the sail with simple spring models, we would observe how the sail is perturbed as it accelerates, we could see that it's made out of atoms and see how those atoms build molecules which build threads which make a fabric, we could even convincingly model the fabric in computers, yet it would tell us very little about why the boat is animated by the sail.

Wow, a real-life dualist? How do you reconcile this view with the findings that various mental operations correspond directly to processes occurring in the brain? Doesn't it seem an odd coincidence that a simple "gateway" also contains everything it would need to do the work itself, without a gateway?

jakear 5y ago
Not the parent and not a “dualist”, but I sometimes like to engage in thought experiments comparing us to intelligent entities on a webpage that have been given access to a REPL on their current context: We discovered document.body.innerHTML (dna?), and perhaps have found a way to establish a debugger connection too (eeg/ekg/etc?). We can see that various sequences of token inputted to the REPL correspond to reproducible outputs (gene engineering), but we have no real understanding how it all works under the covers. That is, we don’t know anything of the miles of renderer/OS/hardware/physics stack that makes it all possible. Importantly to this discussion, we don’t know anything about a funny little sequence called XMLHttpRequest. We see it all over the place and can easily see how particular behaviors correspond to the sequence being invoked, but as far as we can tell it doesn’t act all that differently to any of the other token sequences we test, being perhaps most similar to Math.random, with the exception that it takes a seed as input.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I don't really have an opinion on the subject, but I do think this argument you are making isn't all too convincing. Hypothetical scenario: Imagine if we hadn't discovered the medium of air. Yet we have discovered that putting a sail on a boat makes it randomly push the boat forward. In that case, we could explain the mechanics of the sail with simple spring models, we would observe how the sail is perturbed as it accelerates, we could see that it's made out of atoms and see how those atoms build molecules which build threads which make a fabric, we could even convincingly model the fabric in computers, yet it would tell us very little about why the boat is animated by the sail.