Re:Consciousness is not computation
by dqpb on Monday June 20, 2022 @01:05AM
(#31806473)
A hot bar of iron can "compute" the next state of a hot bar of iron. It cannot compute the next state of any arbitrary program. Can I play Fortnite with nothing more that a hot bar of iron? No, I cannot! Not unless it's compiled to WebAssembly.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
You can but it shifts the burden to the decoder. Since an iron bar over some time period has a finite number of states, there exists a decoder that maps state changes in the iron bar to your Fortnite gameplay.
I think a more fair criticism is that you likely cannot choose the decoder without an oracle (ie the causal relationship would be hard to preserve). I think OPs claim is that consciousness, unlike Fortnite, doesn’t depend on being causally related to some external inputs (thus you don’t need oracle to choose the decoder).
> Since an iron bar over some time period has a finite number of states
Citation needed.
He defined these states through spin flips and I assume we sample slower than decoherence. This is a semi classical system without complicated qm effects.
But even if we didn’t restrict ourselves
log(# of states)~entropy
and there is a maximum (and finite) amount of entropy you can have in a finite volume (actually it scales with surface area) before you get a black hole.