From: Stathis Papaioannou (stathisp@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Mar 21 2008 - 18:51:19 MDT
On 21/03/2008, Lee Corbin <lcorbin@rawbw.com> wrote:
> >> > (a) The file I've received says that the final state of the Australian
> >> > machine was S-6754. The successor state for that is S-2037, so if I
> >> > input that into my machine, the computation won't know it has been
> >> > spread across two continents.
> >>
> >> How did you get a hold of S-2037? If you looked it up somewhere,
> >> or heard from a little bird that you should try S-2037, then the answer
> >> would be no. But if you worked out, i.e., your brain emulated the
> >> machine itself, i.e. calculated state S-2037 from S-6754, then yes,
> >> no [infinitesimal] interruption occurred.
> >
> > I looked it up. The physics of the machine is such that state A will
> > reliably transition to state B. This can either be worked out from
> > first principles or by experiment, and the results stored in a table.
>
>
> But if the result of this calculation is merely stored in a table,
> and subsequent "calculations" just access and exhibit this
> result, then no genuine computation is performed the second
> and later times. Only the first calculation was authentic, and
> also authentic in the sense that I believe consciousness during
> any particular run to depend on this authenticity of computation.
The physics of the machine is just there to determine that the right
state transitions consistently occur. A model of an AND gate does not
have to involve a simulation of semiconductor physics; the only
purpose of the physics is to ensure that the state transitions in a
simple lookup table are followed.
-- Stathis Papaioannou
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:02 MDT