Re: Continuity of Conscious

From: Samantha Atkins (sjatkins@gmail.com)
Date: Sat Apr 01 2006 - 20:52:38 MST


Phillip Huggan wrote:
> You are a different individual every moment, but your core brain
> centers responsible for emerging consciousness are 99.9999% the same,
> not 0% as you imply. I suppose you can represent consciousness
> digitally just like you can model weather or any *physical* system.
> If your representation is accurate (ignoring quantum and some
> classical inaccuracy effects for the moment), you will get an accurate
> future prediction of the system.
How so? To go from even a perfect model of your consciousness to
something useful for prediction would require first of all deciding what
context or inputs you wanted a prediction for the behavior of this
consciousness in relation to and modeling those environmental inputs
with sufficient fidelity. Next you would need to run the resulting
system at sufficient speed to get an answer in a time frame where it is
presumably useful.

> But a future model of the system isn't the actual future system
> because those little binary ones and zeroes you are using for
> modelling, actually represent real *physical* properties. Mass,
> electromagnetic forces, gravity, quantum wavefront evolutions, etc.
> That little sunshine button the cute weather girl points to when
> referring to tomorrow's sunny forecast, isn't an actual star. The
> physical properties our brains harness to give us awareness, are very
> different than are silicon logic gates being flip-flopped by electrons.
>
> I am much more than a collection of data and algorithms. What you are
> referring to is software. My brain is hardware. It runs off of
> multiverse *physics*, not Windows.
>
At bottom it may all be seen as just interacting patterns, i.e.,
information. Don't worry. No one here wants to simulate you on
Windows. That would be truly EVIL. :-)

- samantha



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