Re:The unending quest to explain consciousness
by gear54rus on Friday December 06, 2019 @05:17AM
(#21720525)
Information could be encoded in molecule oscillations and therefore 2 rocks of different temperatures would communicate it when touching (heat transfer would occur). Can this be considered processing?
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Re:The unending quest to explain consciousness
by cygx on Friday December 06, 2019 @06:27AM
(#21720838)
It's doubtful you'll be able to make such a scheme work: Information processing tends to involve storage and retrieval of data. That's not really possible in the thermodynamic regime. You'd have to do all your processing before the information gets lost to thermalization.
Re:The unending quest to explain consciousness
by ghjyui on Friday December 06, 2019 @12:00PM
(#21723664)
Image recognition needs no storage or retrieval of data: it's a single pass thru a series of matrix multiplications. Yet, image recognition is the very definition of data processing.
Re:The unending quest to explain consciousness
by cygx on Friday December 06, 2019 @12:26PM
(#21723958)
How do you propose to perform calculations without data storage (think registers)?
Re:The unending quest to explain consciousness
by adrianN on Friday December 06, 2019 @02:20PM
(#21725072)
Like this for example https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/neural-network-in-glass-requ... though I'm not sure that you can really count this as calculation. But I guess that's the point of this discussion.
Re:The unending quest to explain consciousness
by hackinthebochs on Friday December 06, 2019 @02:49PM
(#21725327)
Heat is entropy, but entropy is basically a measure of disorder/randomness. So when two substances transfer heat, they necessarily are not communicating information, except perhaps that there exists a temperature differential.