3 ms·
A hot bar of iron can "compute" the next state of a hot bar of iron. It cannot compute the next state of any arbitrary program. Can I play Fortnite with nothing
by dqpb 4y ago
A hot bar of iron can "compute" the next state of a hot bar of iron. It cannot compute the next state of any arbitrary program. Can I play Fortnite with nothing more that a hot bar of iron? No, I cannot! Not unless it's compiled to WebAssembly.
- ivalm 4y agoYou can but it shifts the burden to the decoder. Since an iron bar over some time period has a finite number of states, there exists a decoder that maps state changes in the iron bar to your Fortnite gameplay. I think a more fair criticism is that you likely cannot choose the decoder without an oracle (ie the causal relationship would be hard to preserve). I think OPs claim is that consciousness, unlike Fortnite, doesn’t depend on being causally related to some external inputs (thus you don’t need oracle to choose the decoder).
- jwalton 4y ago> Since an iron bar over some time period has a finite number of states Citation needed.
- ivalm 4y agoHe defined these states through spin flips and I assume we sample slower than decoherence. This is a semi classical system without complicated qm effects. But even if we didn’t restrict ourselves log(# of states)~entropy and there is a maximum (and finite) amount of entropy you can have in a finite volume (actually it scales with surface area) before you get a black hole.