4 ms·
> The mapping in a case like the iron bar is entirely ephemeral, pertaining only for an instant. Also even if you somehow oversaw this, the author is effective
by xg15 4y ago
> The mapping in a case like the iron bar is entirely ephemeral, pertaining only for an instant.
Also even if you somehow oversaw this, the author is effectively describing the XOR function. If you take a fixed bitstring (the iron atoms) and xor it with every possible bitstring of the same length (the observers), you get... every possible bitstring of the same length! That's a well-known property of XOR and the reason why you can "decrypt" one-time-pads to every message you like if you just apply the right key.
This means if you accepted the author's proposition that for one observer, the iron bar is running consciousness.exe, then for another observer, the bar will run Doom or WoW or a bitcoin miner or whatever else you want.
The problem is that the things we colloquially call "computers" are also observer-independent: A server will run its program and update its internal state even if no human is watching. That's one thing that distinguishes computation by computers from computation with pen and paper.
So if you add this together, you can prove that computers are not computation, which I think is contradictory.
- SilasX 4y agoAnother test would be, does that physical process reduce the difficulty of the computation? That is, a waterfall isn’t “really playing chess” because any transformation you apply to interpret it as a chess computer would be “doing all the work”.
- jnwatson 4y agoI think the problem stem from the author’s definition of computation. He has defined it around the state of a Turing machine, which is vastly insufficient. The important part of a Turing machine is that of the behavior: given a certain state, the next state is a result of the current instruction on the tape. It is easy to imagine identifying some mapping from a Turing machine state and an iron bar. However, mapping the next state to a valid state transition of the same Turing machine seems quite unlikely, graduating to impossible, as the Turing machine executed. Said another way, a program is not its memory dump.
- csee 4y agoAre they observer independent? From the article: "Of course it is simplest to build a computer where the high voltage states correspond to 1s and the low voltages states 0s or vice versa. But there is no requirement that we build our computers that way. We could build a perfectly valid computer where the high voltage states of even valued registers correspond to 1s and where they correspond to 0s in the odd valued registers, or a computer where the mapping flips on every 13th clock cycle. The system only “computes” because of the way we have encoded information."
- xg15 4y agoThis might work as long as your computer doesn't have any IO. If your computer operates your garage door, I wish you good luck opening the door through the power of imagination.