From: Green Sound (liveevil@020.co.uk)
Date: Wed Sep 22 1999 - 08:35:37 MDT
In a universe where consciousness is easy to instantiate lets create a piece of
galactic art called "The Existential Statement." First, we convert all the
matter and energy in the universe into little boxes, half of them white and half
of them black. Then, inside each of these boxes we instantiate a consciousness:
the white boxes experience heaven the black boxes experience hell. Also, each
of these boxes have their own power source to sustain them for a million years.
So now we have a universe filled with little boxes experiencing the qualia of
either bliss or agony.
I don't want to believe in this type of universe. Instead, I believe that
qualia ceases when a Turing machine no longer interacts with the universe. I
believe this safety valve comes from the unpredictability of quantum states and
that qualia only occurs when the rigid phase space of the machine couples with
the fundamentally unpredictable phase space of the universe creating a new phase
space. A qualia experiencing phase space. The universe WILL NOT allow you
predict its path through phase space, and this acts as the safety valve for all
qualia experiencing machines. These values cannot be simulated so qualia cannot
be produced ex nihilo.
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