Open thread, Nov. 02 - Nov. 08, 2015

MrMind

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

What is a computation? Intuitively some (say binary) states of the physical world are changed, voltage gates switched, rocks moved around (https://xkcd.com/505/), whatever.
Now, in general if these physical changes were done with some intention like in my CPU or the guy moving the rocks in the xkcd comic, then I think of this as a computation, and consequentially I would care for example about if the computation I performed simulated a conscious entity.

However, surely my or my computer's intention can't be what makes the physical state changes count as a computation. But then how do we get around the slippery slope where everything is computing everything imaginable. There are billions of states I can interpret as 1's and 0's which get transformed in countless different ways every time I stir my coffee. Even worse, in quantum mechanics, the state of a point is given by a potentially infinitely wiggly function. What stops me from interpreting all of this as computation which under some encoding gives rise to countless Boltzmann brain type conscious entities and simulated worlds?

I'm confused about your "interpretation". Lets say I throw together a bunch of random transistors. They compute a totally random function. What "encoding" can you possibly use to interpret this is a conscious mind?

Lets just say we already know what consciousness is and what algorithm the human brain uses. Maybe it's something like current neural networks. How would you find a computation of a neural network inside a random circuit?

I don't think you could. You'd need to find groups of logic gates which just happen to compute multiplicati... (read more)

5Viliam11y

I think everything is a computation, and all computations happen... but somehow, some of those computations happen "more" and some of them happen "less". (Similarly how in quantum mechanics any particle can be anywhere, but some combinations of particles "exist"more", and some "exist less", so in real life we don't percieve literally everything, but some specific situations.) Without understanding the nature of this "more" and "less" it will not make much sense... and I don't really understand it.