The problem with Dust theory is that it assumes that conscious states supervene on brain states instantaneously. There is no evidence for that. We should not be fooled by the “specious present”. We seem to be conscious moment-by-moment, but the “moments” in question are rather coarse-grained, corresponding to the specious present of 0.025-0.25 second or so. It’s quite compatible with the phenomenology that it requires thousands or millions of neural events or processing steps to achieve a subjective “instant” of consciousness. Which would mean you can’t salami-slice someone’s stream-of-consciousness too much without it vanishing, and also mean that spontaneously occurring Boltzman-consciousnesses are incredibly unlikely (because you would need a string of states to arise that are “as if” causally connected). Additionally, the idea of computational supervening on instantaneous snapshots of physical activity, irrespective of causal connection and temporal sequence, doesn’t make much sense as a theory of computation.
What is the difference between a computational state and any old state, if not the fact that is part of a computation, that is, a sequence of states.
I don’t believe that that is a necessary assumption at all; the conscious state is still an abstractable representation, and if it maps to a dynamic process that itself can map to a temporally-connected collection of brain-states, then that is just more layers of abstraction.
The Boltzmann Brain could easily be not a brain-state representation, but a conscious-state representation.
That then runs into Bible Code problems: anything maps to anything under a sufficent complex and arbitrary interpretation. But who’s doing the interpretation?
It’s only a problem if you want it to be a problem.
There doesn’t *need* to be anyone doing the interpreting, because all possible representations (and the interpreters/ees within) exist for free. I’m comfortable with that. There’s no need to invoke special privilege to make reality more complicated, just because you want it to be. Fundamental reality *should* be simple, on some level, don’t you think? The complexity is all internal.
Every possible conscious state exists in some immaterial way, for some unspecified reason.
(Alternatively you might be saying that Boltzman interpreters exist, that there are some configurations of matter which are performing computations equivalent to interpretation. However, that would be based on the implicit assumption that being an interpreter is not itself a matter of interpretation. But it if there are interpretation-free facts about which computation maps onto which physical process, then why should there not be such facts about the the computations corresponding to consciousness—again, the detour into interpretation is unnecessary. And the original applies: accidental computations are of any sort are going to be rare, because a computation is a coherent sequence).
The problem with Dust theory is that it assumes that conscious states supervene on brain states instantaneously. There is no evidence for that. We should not be fooled by the “specious present”. We seem to be conscious moment-by-moment, but the “moments” in question are rather coarse-grained, corresponding to the specious present of 0.025-0.25 second or so. It’s quite compatible with the phenomenology that it requires thousands or millions of neural events or processing steps to achieve a subjective “instant” of consciousness. Which would mean you can’t salami-slice someone’s stream-of-consciousness too much without it vanishing, and also mean that spontaneously occurring Boltzman-consciousnesses are incredibly unlikely (because you would need a string of states to arise that are “as if” causally connected). Additionally, the idea of computational supervening on instantaneous snapshots of physical activity, irrespective of causal connection and temporal sequence, doesn’t make much sense as a theory of computation. What is the difference between a computational state and any old state, if not the fact that is part of a computation, that is, a sequence of states.
I don’t believe that that is a necessary assumption at all; the conscious state is still an abstractable representation, and if it maps to a dynamic process that itself can map to a temporally-connected collection of brain-states, then that is just more layers of abstraction.
The Boltzmann Brain could easily be not a brain-state representation, but a conscious-state representation.
That then runs into Bible Code problems: anything maps to anything under a sufficent complex and arbitrary interpretation. But who’s doing the interpretation?
It’s only a problem if you want it to be a problem.
There doesn’t *need* to be anyone doing the interpreting, because all possible representations (and the interpreters/ees within) exist for free. I’m comfortable with that. There’s no need to invoke special privilege to make reality more complicated, just because you want it to be. Fundamental reality *should* be simple, on some level, don’t you think? The complexity is all internal.
Quodlibet, being able to prove anything, is widely seen as a problem.
Is that a fact?
Boltzman brains would certainly follow from that bold conjecture. However, something similar would follow from simpler assumptions.
You seen to be saying:
There are certain configurations of matter that could be conscious minds under a certain interpretation.
The required interpretations exists, since all interpretations exist in some immaterial way, for some unspecified reason.
Therefore accidental conscious minds, Boltzman brains, exist.
Which has the simpler equivalent:-
Every possible conscious state exists in some immaterial way, for some unspecified reason.
(Alternatively you might be saying that Boltzman interpreters exist, that there are some configurations of matter which are performing computations equivalent to interpretation. However, that would be based on the implicit assumption that being an interpreter is not itself a matter of interpretation. But it if there are interpretation-free facts about which computation maps onto which physical process, then why should there not be such facts about the the computations corresponding to consciousness—again, the detour into interpretation is unnecessary. And the original applies: accidental computations are of any sort are going to be rare, because a computation is a coherent sequence).