“I don’t consciously control most of what’s going on in my body” Indeed not—and yet your brain controls many of these lowlevel functions—and is affected by them in turn. Your brain cells, for instance, are powered by mitochondria.
“I don’t find just phrasing these questions very convincing.” I admit, they weren’t really meant to be—to another person. But what went on in my head as I asked myself those questions persuaded me, my only claim.
“With these assumptions, operating from a single tape is not very limiting” Note that in my model, the operation of the tape reader itself is controlled by the tape, even to such things as clearing malfunctions. How deep does that rabbit hole go?
Randall’s cartoon is amusing, but how well do rocks handle non-deterministic quantum processes? Is it really the rocks doing the computations, or are they just outputting the computations that the desert dweller performs in his head? Can he really keep the current machine state in his head? Can machines like that adequately simulate the interactions between different particles and systems within our universe? I think there’s good reason to think that conscious beings do not arise in the universe the rock machine simulates.
One more point: another way of thinking about what I wrote is that I’m essentially asserting that an embodied consciousness is not, by itself, a finite state machine. It is merely one part of the entire universe in which it is embedded, which it senses, and is affected by in other ways, and which it affects.
I also recommend the implications of Adrian Thompson’s evolved tone discrimination circuit, implemented in a FPGA. Lacking a designed clock, the circuit instead used multiple feedback loops, which took a very long time to untangle. Also, the final version of the circuit employed elements that were not in the designed signal paths of the array. Though the array was intended to be digital, the evolved circuit used analog effects to communicate with the isolated elements. How would a finite state machine represent these effects?
All of the known laws of physics are computable to arbitrary precision by a Turing machine, including quantum decoherence. Even non-determinism and chaos aren’t barriers, since you can simulate the state space of the system instead of just tracing one state.
In the cartoon, the computations done are just enormous numbers of finite state transitions with a much smaller state space than even a four-function calculator. The inclusion of a human figure in the picture is just to make it relatable.
The FPGA evolution experiment doesn’t say anything at all about what can be simulated. That experiment can almost certainly be simulated, and similar experiments with similarly puzzling results have been simulated, and then shown to be valid in reality.
One thing we can be sure of: anything that we can discover in finite time can be simulated. The Church-Turing thesis deals with behaviour of computation over unbounded times. All bounded computation is Turing-computable.
“I don’t consciously control most of what’s going on in my body” Indeed not—and yet your brain controls many of these lowlevel functions—and is affected by them in turn. Your brain cells, for instance, are powered by mitochondria.
“I don’t find just phrasing these questions very convincing.” I admit, they weren’t really meant to be—to another person. But what went on in my head as I asked myself those questions persuaded me, my only claim.
“With these assumptions, operating from a single tape is not very limiting” Note that in my model, the operation of the tape reader itself is controlled by the tape, even to such things as clearing malfunctions. How deep does that rabbit hole go?
Randall’s cartoon is amusing, but how well do rocks handle non-deterministic quantum processes? Is it really the rocks doing the computations, or are they just outputting the computations that the desert dweller performs in his head? Can he really keep the current machine state in his head? Can machines like that adequately simulate the interactions between different particles and systems within our universe? I think there’s good reason to think that conscious beings do not arise in the universe the rock machine simulates.
One more point: another way of thinking about what I wrote is that I’m essentially asserting that an embodied consciousness is not, by itself, a finite state machine. It is merely one part of the entire universe in which it is embedded, which it senses, and is affected by in other ways, and which it affects.
I also recommend the implications of Adrian Thompson’s evolved tone discrimination circuit, implemented in a FPGA. Lacking a designed clock, the circuit instead used multiple feedback loops, which took a very long time to untangle. Also, the final version of the circuit employed elements that were not in the designed signal paths of the array. Though the array was intended to be digital, the evolved circuit used analog effects to communicate with the isolated elements. How would a finite state machine represent these effects?
All of the known laws of physics are computable to arbitrary precision by a Turing machine, including quantum decoherence. Even non-determinism and chaos aren’t barriers, since you can simulate the state space of the system instead of just tracing one state.
In the cartoon, the computations done are just enormous numbers of finite state transitions with a much smaller state space than even a four-function calculator. The inclusion of a human figure in the picture is just to make it relatable.
The FPGA evolution experiment doesn’t say anything at all about what can be simulated. That experiment can almost certainly be simulated, and similar experiments with similarly puzzling results have been simulated, and then shown to be valid in reality.
One thing we can be sure of: anything that we can discover in finite time can be simulated. The Church-Turing thesis deals with behaviour of computation over unbounded times. All bounded computation is Turing-computable.