Eugine_Nier comments on The Fabric of Real Things - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 October 2012 02:11AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (305)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 October 2012 09:33:21AM 0 points [-]

A one way causal connection cannot be observed. If neurons cause consciousness, but consciousness does absolutely not affect anything else, then there is literally no way to observe consciousness, and so you must in addition to the description of the causal universe include the fact that there are things that are affected by the universe's existence but does not affect the universe, and furthermore that consciousness is one such thing.

A strictly simpler theory is that there is a causal universe, without all that epiphenomea cruft.

Also, the viewpoint of epiphenomenal consciousness is very much triggering my pattern maching of 'human specific inbuilt stupidity'.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 04:29:45AM 1 point [-]

How's this different from the case photon leaving my future light cone?

Comment author: [deleted] 19 October 2012 03:18:47PM 0 points [-]

it is different because the mathematical model of the universe makes a mention of the photon, but not of the consciousness.

In a theoretical future version of python, the photon example would be:

import universe
universe.Photon().leave(universe.observers["Eugine_Nier"].light_cone)

While the conssciousness example would be:

import universe
import epiConsc
epiCons.Consciousness(universe.observers["Eugine_Nier"]).observe()

On a side note,remember that there are no fundamental photons nor light cones. There is only whatever QFT is the true one; the rest are mathematical consequences.