3 ms·

You don't need to know all that much in order to achieve consciousness. Lets say that you have a program that you assume to be conscious. You run it for 1 secon

• red75prime 4y ago
  Why attribute conscious experiences to the iron bar, when we have a system composed of the iron bar and the interpreter? The bar functions as a very inefficient clock that allows the interpreter to go thru motions originally produced by the conscious program. I bite the bullet and say that the system is conscious while it's playing the recorded states (with a caveat that it cannot interact with anything, unlike the program), and stop being conscious afterwards, unlike the program.
• Dylan16807 4y ago
  > Now, you can find an interpretation of the iron bar that shows that the iron bar casually and deterministically went through those exact same states for a full 1 second. What is the difference between those two situations? Why would the program be conscious but the iron bar would not be? Let's say you find an interpretation that perfectly matches 1 second of calculation, after searching an exponential bazillion states. Then you decide to test the next second, to see if it's the real deal. Oh, it always fails, with certainty 1 - 1 / [exponential bazillion]. Even if you had perfect random noise you could always find an interpretation to XOR with it and "find" any target you're searching for. Even if you had flat 0000000..., you could always find an interpretation to XOR with it and "find" any target you're searching for. The problem is that you actually did the computation when you were finding the "interpretation". Whatever value the rock had becomes irrelevant in a search process like this. The rock isn't doing the computation. Just like in the library of babel, where the book doesn't have the information, the location of the book has the information.
• _zywo 4y ago
  The conscious part of that system is the interpretation, not the bar itself. You have skipped directly over the observer, who is actually performing the conscious computation. Think about how you would actually write a program to achieve this. The iron bar is just a bunch of atoms with random bit states that flip at random intervals - we'll model it as a contiguous 1D array of bits. You have a 1 second consciousness mapping, which is most likely rather large in size. Our interpretation process maps the random bits in the bar to a time instant of the conscious process by interpreting some bits in the bar as themselves, and the other bits in the bar as the reverse of themselves. In other words, our interpretation of which atom-bits are telling the truth and which are lying is itself a 1D array of bits that satisfies the following property: BAR bitxor INTERPRETATION = CONSCIOUS_INSTANT As time progresses, BAR and CONSCIOUS_INSTANT continuously change, therefore necessitating INTERPRETATION to change as well to keep the above formula consistent. In fact, by the rules of XOR, we can compute exactly what INTERPRETATION is at any given moment: INTERPRETATION = CONSCIOUS_INSTANT bitxor BAR But wait! This means that to dynamically know INTERPRETATION, you _must_ know all of the information associated with both CONSCIOUS_INSTANT and BAR. But if you know all the information associated with CONSCIOUS_INSTANT, haven't you already simulated a conscious process...? So there is in fact a consciousness here, but not in the {BAR} system: it is in the {BAR,INTERPRETATION,CONSCIOUS_INSTANT} system. (Note: If you squint at this for long enough, it starts sounding a lot like a motivation for Death of the Author.)