jbotz 2 months ago | next |

I've been on the same trip as this guy for the last couple of decades. I haven't tried to write it up as scientific papers, but I've been actively looking for refutation of some of the key insights that lead down this path of thinking and haven't found any yet.

I think that the key premise here is assuming that consciousness can be a feature of a turing machine. If you accept that premise then all objections to reality being purely mathematical fall away, and Conway's Game of Life (GoL) provides a perfect substrate for thought experiments around this. Because we know that GoL is turing complete, and GoL is obviously purely mathematical... its phenomena exist without our simulating them, simply because they are mathematically possible. We simulate them in order to help us discover their existence, but their existence is "Platonic", independent of our simulations. So if consciousness can be a feature of any turing complete system, then an infinitude of consciousnesses exist in the space of GoL phenomena; consciousnesses from whose perspective their respective (from our perspective purely mathematical) GoL Universes are "material".

The main obstacle to accepting this view is insisting on dualism between the material and the purely mathematical, giving a special status to materialism. But materialism also tends to lead one to accept that consciousness can be a property of turing machines, which would then imply a mathematical reality. I call this paradox "the poverty of materialism", and I'd love to see a convincing refutation.

qazxcvbnm 2 months ago | root | parent |

If consciousness is a property of mathematical systems, and such an infinitude exists, what is the paradox? It sounds quite consistent to me. Could you elaborate?

jbotz 2 months ago | root | parent |

The paradox only exists if you start with philosophical materialism, i.e. the assumption that reality is material in nature and mathematics is just something we use to describe the material reality. If you're not a materialist than there's no paradox, and you probably accept Texmark's view of the mulitverse or something like it.

qazxcvbnm 2 months ago | root | parent |

I’m still not very sure of where the paradox is supposed to be for the materialist. Is the paradox supposed to be something like that the materialist accepts that consciousness is material, and that mathematical structures are not material?

jbotz 2 months ago | root | parent |

Yes... the materialist says that consciousness is a manifestation of the material brain. But if the brain is a kind of computer the best formalism for it we have so far is the turing machine, which we know from cellular automata to be able to exist in a purely mathematical space, so materialism can't be correct.

The only way out from this paradox that can preserve materialism is to say that consciousness requires some feature of material reality that goes beyond turing completeness, perhaps quantum phenomena. shrug. Maybe so, but so far there is no evidence, and in the meantime AI is getting closer and closer to something like consciousness on plain old turing machine computers, no quantum computers required.

empath75 2 months ago | prev | next |

This is 8 years old, and as far as I can tell, has never been cited by anyone other than the author.

OutOfHere 2 months ago | root | parent | next |

Too true. In fact, none of the author's other writings in quant-ph on Arxiv have been cited by any scientific work of anyone other than the author. Still, I don't think it's an objective reason to be dismissive.

slowmovintarget 2 months ago | root | parent | prev |

And seems to be about the parallel branches of Everettian Mechanics, not the multiverse of brane theory (the Bulk), or the multiverse of multiple disconnected bubbles of false vacuum.

anon291 2 months ago | prev | next |

Anyone making an absolute claim of knowledge of the nature of self-awareness needs to demonstrate how qualia arises by making a testable way to disable qualia in humans or to demonstrate qualia in a non-human system. The latter is preferred.

VirusNewbie 2 months ago | prev |

This person is making a mistake with Everettian mechanics, assuming there is branching, which is precisely not what is happening.

nh23423fefe 2 months ago | root | parent |

Everett used the same terminology

VirusNewbie 2 months ago | root | parent |

no, he talks about the perception of branching. The universe isn't branching, a coherent thread we observe is.

It's the difference between tracing a path on a graph, and seeing a graph change.

hollerith 2 months ago | root | parent | prev |

But I don't percieve any branching. Do you?

VirusNewbie 2 months ago | root | parent |

of course. I see the cat end up dead or alive, not in the superposition of both. Hence, I perceive a branch.

Nevermark 2 months ago | root | parent | next |

Hmm. A branch can mean one of the branches, or it can mean the bifurcation that created branches.

Not really responding directly to your comment.

But I see the opportunity for a lot of disagreement based on slightly different term use.

hollerith 2 months ago | root | parent | prev |

I meant that to all appearances, I seem to live in a reality that does not ever split, and it is only a complex deductive argument made by Everett and his followers that makes me to suspect that reality does in fact split.

Anyway, I doubt that further dialog between you and I will lead anywhere fruitful.