[FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 198, Issue 1 would send to nick, Dave west

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I agree. But the key point in Dave's setup is the emergentism: "... the Turing Machine 'wakes up' ..."

The question becomes one of whether or not the "waking up" is discrete or continuous. And if discrete, is it a spectrum (with lots of stages ... a tiny bit woke, some woke, a lot woke. And in either the spectral or continuous case, it becomes a question of *scale*. How much of the base "stuff" is needed to register as woke?

This is why I brought up the quantum and distributed computing and scales in space and time. How *many* processors can we make work simultaneously? And the dual question: What's the scale of the time window within which the processors must behave/act/compute in order for them to be considered "simultaneous"?

To make the question more human. If you tell a joke and your audience takes too long to laugh, your joke may not be funny or the audience isn't "woke" to the joke ... perhaps even brain-dead zombies with no senses of humor. 8^) Another example is the satellite delay we witness in every news program on TV ... or even half-duplex conversations on cell phones, where you keep interrupting each other because the *scale* of your "too much silence, must speak" window is mismatched with that of the other person.

These *scales* are critical to our judgement of something being conscious or not. The difference between being conscious of an acute pain from nerves versus the ache of something like constipation or thirst is one of *scale*, scale in time and scale in space (distribution). Any serious monist has to address scale. No treatment of scale means no credible monism.

On 12/5/19 7:32 AM, HighlandWindsLLC Miller wrote:
> Dave et al: I think 1 and 3 of your Turing machine apply. Peggy m Miller

> On 12/4/19 4:08 AM, Prof David West wrote:
>> [...]
>> A favorite science fiction meme: once enough ones and zeros have moved from the tape into "memory" the Turing Machine "wakes up"  becomes conscious. Instant dualism, but without much reason as mere "location" changes nothing about the "stuff" which is still ones and zeros. (one "stuff," two values)
>>  [...]
>> 1- Is each individual human being a separate (but equal) instantiation of a Turing Machine consuming a separate (but equal) infinite tape.  If yes, then the door seems to be opened for "private" experience/consciousness.
>> 
>> 2- each human is a separate Turing Machine, but all consume the "same" infinite tape. "Same" meaning mostly identical, but with some allowance for perspective (slight variation in which portions of the tape are consumed when??). I believe that this would be your preferred interpretation as it might allow some kind of dialog among Turing machines as each one "wrote" to the infinite tape that all were consuming and, perhaps, somehow, thereby lead to some kind of "consensus computation."
>> 
>> 3- there is but One Turing Machine, co-extensive with the Universe and One infinite tape, also co-extensive with the Universe and therefore the Universe is constantly "computing" itself. (Writing to the tape equals popping quantum quiffs, i.e. collapsing wave functions by observing.)

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