DanArmak comments on The conscious tape - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (113)
A TM has an infinite working tape, but the problem of human-like consciousness has only finite input and output sizes. Therefore, you could define an (infinite) function by simply listing all possible pairs of (finite) inputs and outputs. This is a completely static, time-less representation that is still powerful enough to compute anything with bounded inputs and outputs.
Of course you can collapse any function into a static precomputation, but that is still itself a function, and it still requires at least one step, and it still requires the turing machine head, so you have not removed time.
I'm aware of no time-less representation of a turing machine, it seems impossible in principle.
Furthermore, for the system to exist in the real world, it will have to produce outputs for particular inputs at particular times - the time requirement is also imposed by the fact of time in our universe.
What you say is true. I find myself unsure how it applies to the original subject. Possibly my comment wasn't on topic... So feel free to ignore it.