Tom_McCabe2 comments on GAZP vs. GLUT

9Eliezer_Yudkowsky07 April 2008 01:51AM

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Tom_McCabe207 April 2008 02:59:59AM1 point [-]

"Otherwise even a GLUT would be conscious, right?"

I have to admit that this sounds crazy, and that I don't really understand what's going on. But it looks like it's logically necessary that lookup tables *can* be conscious. As far as we know, the Universe, and everything in it, can be simulated on a giant Turing machine. What is a Turing machine, if not a lookup table? Granted, most Turing machines use a much smaller set of symbols than a GLUT- base 5 or base 10 instead of base 10^10^50- but how would that change a system from being "non-conscious" to being "conscious"? And while a Turing machine has a state register, this can be simulated by just using N lookup tables instead of one lookup table. It seems like we have to believe that 1), the mathematical structure of a UTM relative to a giant lookup table, which is very minimal indeed, is the key element required for consciousness, or 2), the Universe is not Turing-computable, or 3), consciousness does not exist.