Even if having an experience requires more than a single instant
You don’t get it. Experiences aren’t things that require time to occur—they ARE the moments of time.
and a brain could arise and persist even for a full second, with sufficient luck, within a heat dead universe
Irrelevant. The algorithm does not depend on the nature of the system that manifests it.
I am unable to understand why you can’t understand this incredibly simple point. Do you imagine that the nature of the implementing hardware changes the behavior of an algorithm? Do you think a program run on a ‘virtual’ computer behaves differently than one run on an equivalent ‘real’ computer?
If I run a Java program that implements Conway’s Game of Life, do you think it will behave any differently when I encode a computational system in, let’s say, a hive of bees, and use it to implement that program?
edit PaleMoon lost original reply. I will try to recreate it :(
Not saying you’re incorrect in criticizing the above(the two claims do seem incompatible), but isn’t it the case that algorithms are just structures and that only they take time only to run? What I mean is that within the block-universe view there would be structures that we would be in ignorance of their nature and in order for us to learn about them we might have to count them (and since we are living in a timeline with computers that operate per cycle our accounting of them would take some time to complete), but that it’s only ignorance to an observer like us that necessitates this? That if you knew some property of some local region of the block-universe you could use it to estimate some other property via the algorithm that represents their (mutual) structure, but that the algorithm describing their structure merely is. There’s plenty of times when choosing algorithms to describe mathematical objects that we choose algorithms that fall along a space-time tradeoff, so it stands to reason that there should be a ‘all-space’ choice that only encodes the answer we seek in structure alone.
The parent made 3 claims(the 3rd one was snuck into the conclusion). I only addressed 2 and 3. 1 is a credible point that stands on its own merit. Without points 2 and 3 however with 1 it’s no longer a sound argument.
I am unable to understand why you can’t understand this incredibly simple point. Do you imagine that the nature of the implementing hardware changes the behavior of an algorithm? Do you think a program run on a ‘virtual’ computer behaves differently than one run on an equivalent ‘real’ computer?
If I run a Java program that implements Conway’s Game of Life, do you think it will behave any differently when I encode a computational system in, let’s say, a hive of bees, and use it to implement that program?
You don’t have any evidence that conscious experience supervenes on objectively instantaneous moments.
You don’t have any evidence that conscious experience supervenes on algorithms rather than underlying physical activity.
The two claims are incompatible, since alalgorithms take some time to run.
edit PaleMoon lost original reply. I will try to recreate it :(
Not saying you’re incorrect in criticizing the above(the two claims do seem incompatible), but isn’t it the case that algorithms are just structures and that only they take time only to run? What I mean is that within the block-universe view there would be structures that we would be in ignorance of their nature and in order for us to learn about them we might have to count them (and since we are living in a timeline with computers that operate per cycle our accounting of them would take some time to complete), but that it’s only ignorance to an observer like us that necessitates this? That if you knew some property of some local region of the block-universe you could use it to estimate some other property via the algorithm that represents their (mutual) structure, but that the algorithm describing their structure merely is. There’s plenty of times when choosing algorithms to describe mathematical objects that we choose algorithms that fall along a space-time tradeoff, so it stands to reason that there should be a ‘all-space’ choice that only encodes the answer we seek in structure alone.
I don’t see how that relates to the supervenience of experiential states on instantaneous brain states.
The parent made 3 claims(the 3rd one was snuck into the conclusion). I only addressed 2 and 3. 1 is a credible point that stands on its own merit. Without points 2 and 3 however with 1 it’s no longer a sound argument.