From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Tue Jun 18 2002 - 20:43:19 MDT
Lee writes:
> We all know the basic difference, apparent every day of our lives,
> between static representations and dynamically changing ones over
> time. We never suppose a frozen state, or even a sequence of frozen
> states, to be conscious or to be experiencing anything. So where does
> this bizarre notion that appears to afflict you and Greg Egan that
> a large enough number of separate patterns---say separate integers---
> take on any sort of dynamism? For me, since no information flows
> between dead and passive structures, they're not alive. But apparently
> for you, Rafal, and perhaps Mike, they are. (To be fair to Greg Egan,
> he stated in an interview that he doesn't necessarily buy the ideas in
> Permutation City.)
Actually I was not claiming this, and I don't think my argument depends
on it. My claim was only that computer programs and even executions of
programs exist in the same abstract sense that numbers and geometric
shape exists. I am undecided on the issue of whether "passive" data
could have the same properties.
However I can make two arguments in favor of that idea, even though I am
not fully persuaded by them. The first is to think of the universe as a
four-dimensional space-time continuum. One of the ideas from relativity
theory is that time is a fourth dimension. It is a little different
from the other dimensions in that the metric in that direction has a
minus sign. But conceptually you can still think of the entire history of
the universe as a four-dimensional object. This object is, in a sense,
"static", in that time is one of its internal dimensions and the object
(the universe's history) does not change in some other kind of dynamic
way. This view is sometimes called the "block universe" because we think
of the history of the universe as a sort of solid, four-dimensional block.
So, here is a structure which is (in a sense) static and yet it does
contain conscious entities. So this might give us some reason to think
that static entities can contain consciousness if they have the right
kind of internal structure.
Another example comes from Wolfram's new book. I haven't read it yet (it
supposedly shipped from Amazon yesterday) but according to the reviews,
one of Wolfram's points is that one of his one-dimensional CA's is shown
to be universal. That is, with the proper arrangement of initial bits
on the line, this CA can perform any computation whatsoever.
If so, then it can perform a computation which contains conscious
entities. This computation can be expressed as a 2-dimensional grid,
where each row going down the page contains the successive states of
the 1-D CA. From what I have heard, Wolfram fills his books with such
pictures.
Again, this 2-D picture is equivalent, in a sense, to a 1-D process.
Given that the 1-D CA has discrete cells and executes in discrete
steps, the 2-D record of its history is mathematically isomorphic to
the 1-D execution. Time becomes the second dimension in this case.
So this is another example in which a static structure can be thought
of as embedding conscious beings.
This view may raise the question of whether the 2-D picture is conscious
"all the time", whether there is in some sense a conscious entity buried
in there who is thinking all thoughts at once, and other difficult
questions. I can't really answer these, other than to say that adopting
the view that static data can contain or embed consciousness requires
us to rethink the question of how consciousness relates to the external
space and time.
But of course believing that Platonic computer programs could create
our own consciousness requires at least as much as a leap, and after
a while it all starts to seem curiously reasonable.
Hal
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