From: Stathis Papaioannou (stathisp@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Mar 12 2008 - 04:41:23 MDT
On 12/03/2008, Lee Corbin <lcorbin@rawbw.com> wrote:
> You might as well have a succession of frozen states, each actually
> having no intrinsic connection with the rest (for an intuitive
description
> of "The Problem of the Succession of Frozen States", see
> http://www.leecorbin.com/SFS.html).
>
> Of course this reduces to the problem of "The Theory of Dust", and
> we are right back to wondering how a pattern found in one cubic
> lightyear of dust, that appears to be Sa, could really be connected
> in any meaningful way with another pattern found in another cubic
> lightyear 10,000,000 parsecs away. Again, I just don't think that
> all those patches of dust constitute consciousness (no information
> flow, no time involved). A perfectly consistent position for a
> time chauvinist like me.
Yes, it comes back to the same thing. I know I'm in a minority, but I don't
see a problem with assuming that consciousness can happen with a succession
of frozen states. The two reasons you give in your article for rejecting a
conscious SFS are (a) that it's obviously absurd, and (b) that it doesn't
result in information flow between the states. But I don't think it's
obviously absurd, and I see the lack of information flow (or inability to
handle counterfactuals) as just making it impossible for us as external
observers to use the system for computation.
-- Stathis Papaioannou
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:02 MDT