Though I guess a lot depends on whether the computation* of Durham counting to 8 requires the computation of Durham being aware of having counted to 7. If it doesn’t, then the program can produce the following sequence: x7 = Durham->countTo(7); x8 = Durham->countTo(8); Durham->awareOf(x8); Durham->awareOf(x7); with the result that Durham goes “8, 7” without any cheating.
The question of whether Durham experiences “7,8” or “8,7″ is less clear, though.
I’m more comfortable talking about computation rather than simulation here, because I’m not at all convinced that there’s any difference between a real counting-to-7 and a simulated counting-to-7. I don’t think the distinction actually matters in this context though.
With thanks to HonoreDB, yes, the structure must have a source. And also, as with the Chinese Room, there is a sleight-of-concept going on where something that looks like a human (Searle’s paper manipulator and Egan’s Durham) is not the actual “brains” of the system (which are really the symbol manipulation rules with Searle, or the dust/translator combination with Egan) that we’re truly analyzing.
I agree with you that if there is not stateful process to worry about, but merely the instantiation of a trivially predictable “movie-like image of counting the number 8” then the dust hypothesis might make sense… but I suspect that very few of the phenomena that we care about are like this, nor do I think that such phenomena are going to be interesting to us post-uploading. I can’t fully and succinctly explain the intuition I have here, but the core of the objection it is connected to reversible computing, computational irreducibility, and their relation to entropy and hence the expenditure of energy.
From these inspirations, it seems likely to me that “the dust” can only be said to contain structure that I care about if the energy used to identify/extract/observe that structure is less than what would have been required for an optimally efficient computational process to invent that structure from scratch. Thus, there is probably a mechanically rigorous way to distinguish between hearing a sound versus imagining that same sound, that grows out of the way that hearing requires fewer joules than imagining. If a dust interpretation system requires too much energy, I would guess either than it is mediating a scientifically astonishing real signal (in a grossly inefficent way)… or you’re dealing with a sort of clever hans effect where the interpretation system plus its battery is the real source of the “detected patterns”, not the dust.
Using this vocabulary to speak directly to the issues raised in the article on strong substrate independence, the problem with other quantum narratives (or the bits of platospace mathematicians spend their time “exploring”) is that the laws of physical computation seem such that our brains can never hear anything from those “places”, our brains can only imagine them.
Yes, that seems like a reasonable way to state more rigorously the distinction between systems I might care about and systems I categorically don’t care about.
Though, thinking about Permutation City a bit more… we, as readers of the novel, have access to the frame in which Peer’s consciousness manifests. The residents of PC don’t have access to it; Peer is no easier for them to access than the infinite number of other consciousnesses they could in principle “detect” within their architecture.
So we care about Peer, and they don’t, and neither of us cares about the infinite number of Peer’s peers. Makes sense.
But there is a difference: their history includes the programming exploit that created the space in which Peer exists, and the events that led to Peer existing within it. One can imagine a resident of PC finding those design notes and building a gadget based on them to encounter Peer, and this would not require implausible amounts of either energy or luck.
And I guess the existence of those design notes would make me care more about Peer than about his peers, were I a resident of PC… which is exactly what I’d predict from this theory.
Ah, I see. Sure, agreed.
Though I guess a lot depends on whether the computation* of Durham counting to 8 requires the computation of Durham being aware of having counted to 7. If it doesn’t, then the program can produce the following sequence: x7 = Durham->countTo(7); x8 = Durham->countTo(8); Durham->awareOf(x8); Durham->awareOf(x7); with the result that Durham goes “8, 7” without any cheating.
The question of whether Durham experiences “7,8” or “8,7″ is less clear, though.
I’m more comfortable talking about computation rather than simulation here, because I’m not at all convinced that there’s any difference between a real counting-to-7 and a simulated counting-to-7. I don’t think the distinction actually matters in this context though.
With thanks to HonoreDB, yes, the structure must have a source. And also, as with the Chinese Room, there is a sleight-of-concept going on where something that looks like a human (Searle’s paper manipulator and Egan’s Durham) is not the actual “brains” of the system (which are really the symbol manipulation rules with Searle, or the dust/translator combination with Egan) that we’re truly analyzing.
I agree with you that if there is not stateful process to worry about, but merely the instantiation of a trivially predictable “movie-like image of counting the number 8” then the dust hypothesis might make sense… but I suspect that very few of the phenomena that we care about are like this, nor do I think that such phenomena are going to be interesting to us post-uploading. I can’t fully and succinctly explain the intuition I have here, but the core of the objection it is connected to reversible computing, computational irreducibility, and their relation to entropy and hence the expenditure of energy.
From these inspirations, it seems likely to me that “the dust” can only be said to contain structure that I care about if the energy used to identify/extract/observe that structure is less than what would have been required for an optimally efficient computational process to invent that structure from scratch. Thus, there is probably a mechanically rigorous way to distinguish between hearing a sound versus imagining that same sound, that grows out of the way that hearing requires fewer joules than imagining. If a dust interpretation system requires too much energy, I would guess either than it is mediating a scientifically astonishing real signal (in a grossly inefficent way)… or you’re dealing with a sort of clever hans effect where the interpretation system plus its battery is the real source of the “detected patterns”, not the dust.
Using this vocabulary to speak directly to the issues raised in the article on strong substrate independence, the problem with other quantum narratives (or the bits of platospace mathematicians spend their time “exploring”) is that the laws of physical computation seem such that our brains can never hear anything from those “places”, our brains can only imagine them.
Yes, that seems like a reasonable way to state more rigorously the distinction between systems I might care about and systems I categorically don’t care about.
Though, thinking about Permutation City a bit more… we, as readers of the novel, have access to the frame in which Peer’s consciousness manifests. The residents of PC don’t have access to it; Peer is no easier for them to access than the infinite number of other consciousnesses they could in principle “detect” within their architecture.
So we care about Peer, and they don’t, and neither of us cares about the infinite number of Peer’s peers. Makes sense.
But there is a difference: their history includes the programming exploit that created the space in which Peer exists, and the events that led to Peer existing within it. One can imagine a resident of PC finding those design notes and building a gadget based on them to encounter Peer, and this would not require implausible amounts of either energy or luck.
And I guess the existence of those design notes would make me care more about Peer than about his peers, were I a resident of PC… which is exactly what I’d predict from this theory.
OK, then.