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Why do waves split and gather again ?
These Socratic games are fun, and I guess I get where you’re coming from. .. but that doesn’t really answer my question regarding subject persistence and the subjective continuity of identity. What emerges tomorrow when I wake up could be another me, like one can argue that a new wave forms after the split.
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= emergent ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism , yes it's clear that a lot has already been written about this kind of idea. A difficulty is that it may interact with questions about the nature of existence and the nature of time. Would consciousness work properly in a deterministic block universe? What would be the relationship between my consciousness now and my consciousness of 10 seconds ago, do they both exist indepe…
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And yet... I use "ESP" all the time, for trivial things: leaving the house so as to arrive at the bus stop just before my bus does. AFAIK, the PEAR lab came closest to formally establishing "psi" (or whatever it is) but never in such a way as to be absolutely incontrovertible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalie... It's almost as if the phenomenon is coy . It's a cultural "blockage": overcome…
James Randy has a million dollars waiting for you if you can convince him that you have ESP.
It's Randi, not Randy. And he's retired now and the "paranormal challenge was officially terminated by the JREF in 2015."
Anyway, I have a lot of respect for him, he does (well, did) good and important work.
But the inability of a guy to encounter "genuine psi" who has made it his life's-work to show "it" to be non-existent does not contradict what I've said in this thread.
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Because then you could also point to 'interactions of transistors' and claim that a computer can be conscious. But this claim has been refuted already.
Why not? You just don't nearly have enough transistors and connections.
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Yes. The way I think about it, to be conscious, one has to be conscious of something. The only way to do that is to have a representation of that thing in memory. When the representation matches incoming sense data we then perceive the relevant thing. Thus, a single atom cannot be conscious. It could at a stretch be regarded as a miniature body , perhaps, but could it contain a memory system? Presumably not.
Isn't it actually what panexperientalism is? The universe is one giant state machine with the memory of it's current state and it's current state deciding what to invoke next.
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Explicate please
Any adequate description of consciousness will break down in to "does this thing have an internal life of the mind, a subjective experience of reality, so to speak, or is it merely an extremely convincing automaton?" Of course, this applies to other people too if you want to be solipsistic about it.
Not so. Not all theories of consciousness allow for the existence of 'p-zombies'.
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Why not? You just don't nearly have enough transistors and connections.
Because no matter how advanced of a computer hardware/software you build, you will not have a 'mind' in it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
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These Socratic games are fun, and I guess I get where you’re coming from. .. but that doesn’t really answer my question regarding subject persistence and the subjective continuity of identity. What emerges tomorrow when I wake up could be another me, like one can argue that a new wave forms after the split.
Most of the atoms in our bodies are replaced on a regular basis (5 years on average) - are we another person then ?
What puzzles me is the persistence of identity across interruptions of consciousness, even though your brain can be mutated while you are not there.
The only mostly permanent thing in the brain is neuronal DNA since most neurons don’t undergo mitosis.
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Most of the atoms in our bodies are replaced on a regular basis (5 years on average) - are we another person then ?
The ship of Theseus doesn’t help your cause here. I’m not the same person I was 5 seconds ago. The self is obviously mutable, which kind of makes sense as long as there is a continuity of consciousness. What puzzles me is the persistence of identity across interruptions of consciousness, even though your brain can be mutated while you are not there. The only mostly permanent thing in the brain is neuronal DNA since m…
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> That's easy to disprove. A calculator isn't sophisticated enough to simulate itself, but a modern computer can perfectly simulate itself. What you say is pretty obviously false: a computer with finite memory cannot simulate itself in a general case because that would require more memory than it actually has or a compression algorithm that's effective on random data, because its memory would need to contain the emul…
How is random memory relevant here? Today we can run entire Linux in a web page and we can surely run a simulation of IBM PC.
Because memory can be filled with random data, so that's a case that needs to be handled if a computer is to "perfectly simulate itself."
>> That's easy to disprove. A calculator isn't sophisticated enough to simulate itself, but a modern computer can perfectly simulate itself.
> Today we can run entire Linux in a web page and we can surely run a simulation of IBM PC.
You said "a modern computer can perfectly simulate itself." If you think "running Linux in a web page" is an example of that, I don't think you understood your initial statement. A modern computer can simulate a less-capable version of itself, but it cannot "perfectly simulate itself," as I showed in my comment.
It's not a good look to come in with an "easy disproof" that itself contains a pretty obvious falsehood. Also I'd wager your implicit statement that the OP's "to understand" is encompassed by your "to simulate" would be generally considered pretty controversial, at a minimum.