Part of the illusion here is the use of the word "Siri". Implicit in this word is an amalgamation or aggregation of components as "one thing." The word "Siri" is actually a vibration. It is a wave composed of wavelings, but as you said before — take one waveling out of the mix, and you no longer have the wave that means "Siri."

So when I say "Siri" to you, or you read it as a state machine, you have to cannibalize the wave or word into components to work with them as a discrete state processor. At no time is there ONE amalgamating "knower" in Siri. There are "regional groupings" of states that are merely a function of how the engineers placed the gates and wires in proximity to ferry the states around by flicking switches to represent them.

The core issue is the origin of the WAVE that is a function of LIGHT or SOUND. Information all goes back to these 2 things essentially. "Dog" or "Siri" or any other object MUST, like the wave, EXIST as "something" indivisible to begin with, in order for the discrete processor to do anything with the discrete states that represent it. IT being the operative term, because you can't reference IT by "one waveling or a single group of wavelings." It must be the root wave, which is itself smacking to an indivisible element that is reflecting it.

 

Salt Lake City I just confirmed is the capital, and that's a good point to key off. Because you would say she "knows" the difference, and I do not. She, or IT is simply "programmed" to "reflect" a difference. And there's a big difference!

"Programmed to reflect a difference" -- a difference between what?

How do I know the difference between Provo, Utah and Salt Lake City, Utah? Having never visited either, everything I know about them I've read somewhere. How does Siri know the difference between Provo and SLC? She read it somewhere, too. What exactly is the difference between me looking up a bunch of words related to both cities and Siri looking up a bunch of words related to both cities?

One obvious difference is that she has a much more reliable short-term memory than I do, and can quote entire passages verbatim. What else?

What about feeling? Humans tend to have emotional responses to the words they read that almost certainly are foreign to Siri. When I read that SLC is the center for the Church of Latter Day Saints, that evokes an emotional response in me. But what, fundamentally, is that emotional response other than just an association between various conceptual and physiological states? If, after reading the Wiki entry for SLC, Siri lights up an LED -- exhibiting an association between conceptual and "physiological" states -- isn't she showing a primitive form of emotion?

If you protest, "Siri was programmed to respond that way", I'd counter with "So was I!" My genetic code is quite different than Siri's C++ code, but it is nonetheless programming. When I was conceived, the vast array of molecules that comprised my body were programmed to follow very specific instructions that ultimately led to a human being with a brain that is capable of storing and processing state. Siri had a roughly similar birth, though her programming is far more focused than mine. She was designed over a few years to do a few tasks, I was designed over a few hundred million years to be adaptive to any task. Consequently, my association capabilities are far, far greater than Siri's.

But we're both fundamentally the same thing: information processors.

What is she ACTUALLY saying to "HER?" She simply DAC'd the string of binaries into a pressure wave to represent them. You "caught" the wave. The wave hits your ACD, and those strings are sent to your neurons.

At no time is the information anything more than discrete "binary states" all the way down.

There are no binary states in the acoustic waveform, so your claim cannot be true. What is true is that information has been transferred from Wikipedia to Siri's lips to my ears. There's nothing uniquely human about that transfer.

How can you define meaning, if at no time you do not distinguish between a string of states and what they represent as "1 referential undivided form"? There's no representation to you outside of "more state strings."

I don't define meaning, and neither do you. No one can, which is why English has like 16 different definitions for "meaning". Meaning is a personal thing, unique to each information processor. And, yes, it is entirely a circular string of states. What Utah "means" to Siri I can never know, just like I can never know what Utah "means" to you. I don't even know what it "means" to me. It can "mean" a lot of different things, because I have a lot of state associations, and that's all "meaning" is, state associations. Purely circular, purely personal. We don't need to worry about "meaning".

 

Science NEEDS to be concerned with dissecting the hell out of the very instrument it's using to DO science. Anything "knowable" including one's own thought mechanics should be part of legit totality of "science," and that's what I'm vying for here.

I agree that scientists should be generally aware of the epistemological issues surrounding their craft, and I agree that a science of epistemology is important work. But physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are not the domain of epistemology. Nor should they be. If there truly are limits to knowledge, these scientific fields are far, far, far away from them. I'm perfectly content to let them explore their microcosms without worrying about the limits of human reason.

Most definitions around the net concerning solipsism include the inability to know things outside of what's happening in the brain's "self-states" (assuming a non-dualistic starting premise is part of it, there is no "mind" here in a meta-sense). That is indeed what is going on if you are a discrete state processor that is using built-in programmed states from an outside source vs. "new states" coming in to create "new states." While there are discrete COMPONENTS (gates) that might temporarily yield a "new state", in the end, the final output string of states have NOTHING to do with each other to the machine.

Your phrasing of "output string states" is strange to me, as if you believe that an information processor actually produces strings of state. Everything is state, so "strings of state" is like saying "state of state", which is weird. In any case, I disagree with your implied inability (and hence use of solipsism). I create information processors that interact with the world external to them. My brain interacts with the world around it, too. States influencing states.

The simplest adder has flicked a bunch of switches. It is not aware that it did, or what they represent, and no amount of compounded circuitry changes this. The end game of a componental discrete bit-processing unit are discrete switches flicked or lightbulbs lit up, or pixels illuminated, or a servo activated.

You're assuming an awful lot about "awareness" here. When I perform an addition, what signifies that I am "aware" of what I did? How is that different in kind than what the circuit does when it's "aware" that it has completed its calculation? This is a serious question. An LED illumininates and a servo motor activates, or my eyelids open wide and my arms gesticulate as I shout "Eureka!" What's the difference? Both the circuit and I have completed a calculation and reacted to that event. What is the difference?

 

Part of the illusion here is the use of the word "Siri". Implicit in this word is an amalgamation or aggregation of components as "one thing." The word "Siri" is actually a vibration. It is a wave composed of wavelings, but as you said before — take one waveling out of the mix, and you no longer have the wave that means "Siri."

"Siri" is a label, a set of symbols representing a concept. I can validly replace "Siri" with "basic information processor" in everything I've written, but "Siri" is easier to type. Information processors, as states with the capability of transforming state, are more complex than non-information processing states. Thus, we may consider sub-states of information processors (the component level) or we can group them all together and just refer to the bunch. Zooming in and out is another, particularly impressive form of information processing.

So when I say "Siri" to you, or you read it as a state machine, you have to cannibalize the wave or word into components to work with them as a discrete state processor. At no time is there ONE amalgamating "knower" in Siri. There are "regional groupings" of states that are merely a function of how the engineers placed the gates and wires in proximity to ferry the states around by flicking switches to represent them.

Siri's "ONE amalgamating 'knower'" is her CPU; mine is my brain. Siri's CPU was designed by engineers, mine (and the engineers') by nature. The brain has "regional groupings" of neuron clusters, like the visual cortex, the motor cortex, etc. that it ferry states around and make us experience and move. What is the difference?

You often say that I'm invoking a magic wand, but you're the one who keep ascribing magic powers to human information processors. Human, the Great Amalgamator!

The core issue is the origin of the WAVE that is a function of LIGHT or SOUND. Information all goes back to these 2 things essentially. "Dog" or "Siri" or any other object MUST, like the wave, EXIST as "something" indivisible to begin with, in order for the discrete processor to do anything with the discrete states that represent it. IT being the operative term, because you can't reference IT by "one waveling or a single group of wavelings." It must be the root wave, which is itself smacking to an indivisible element that is reflecting it.

Waves, you'll recall, are not indivisible -- as linear superpositions of other waves, we can easily and reversibly separate them into their components.

 

Waves, you'll recall, are not indivisible -- as linear superpositions of other waves, we can easily and reversibly separate them into their components.

Indivisible in the sense of "classification." Once the wave that represents "Siri" is compromised by pulling wavelings out, you lose the "Siri" wave. Because that wave is defined AS the superposition of the wavelings (and incidentally, we can’t get at every waveling, just some)

So as a state processor, you're asking a very funny question: Where is the dog in the light? Why do you ask such a question? If you "see" the dog, why the question?

Further to this, what good is the endowment of property "consciousness" if you can't define it? Does it have something to do with the question about the dog above?

Also, for the record, you have absolutely no idea where you came from! You came from your mother. You surmise you came from "nature". No proof = religion. ;=)

I believe there IS a "magic wand" in the human being — but it is not in the discrete state processor by nature of its definition!

And the CPU is not an amalgamating "knower." It's a collection of gates and wires. No one gate or state is aware of any other.

 

"Programmed to reflect a difference" -- a difference between what?

How do I know the difference between Provo, Utah and Salt Lake City, Utah? Having never visited either, everything I know about them I've read somewhere. How does Siri know the difference between Provo and SLC? She read it somewhere, too. What exactly is the difference between me looking up a bunch of words related to both cities and Siri looking up a bunch of words related to both cities?

One obvious difference is that she has a much more reliable short-term memory than I do, and can quote entire passages verbatim. What else?

What about feeling? Humans tend to have emotional responses to the words they read that almost certainly are foreign to Siri. When I read that SLC is the center for the Church of Latter Day Saints, that evokes an emotional response in me. But what, fundamentally, is that emotional response other than just an association between various conceptual and physiological states? If, after reading the Wiki entry for SLC, Siri lights up an LED -- exhibiting an association between conceptual and "physiological" states -- isn't she showing a primitive form of emotion?

If you protest, "Siri was programmed to respond that way", I'd counter with "So was I!" My genetic code is quite different than Siri's C++ code, but it is nonetheless programming. When I was conceived, the vast array of molecules that comprised my body were programmed to follow very specific instructions that ultimately led to a human being with a brain that is capable of storing and processing state. Siri had a roughly similar birth, though her programming is far more focused than mine. She was designed over a few years to do a few tasks, I was designed over a few hundred million years to be adaptive to any task. Consequently, my association capabilities are far, far greater than Siri's.

But we're both fundamentally the same thing: information processors.


There are no binary states in the acoustic waveform, so your claim cannot be true. What is true is that information has been transferred from Wikipedia to Siri's lips to my ears. There's nothing uniquely human about that transfer.


I don't define meaning, and neither do you. No one can, which is why English has like 16 different definitions for "meaning". Meaning is a personal thing, unique to each information processor. And, yes, it is entirely a circular string of states. What Utah "means" to Siri I can never know, just like I can never know what Utah "means" to you. I don't even know what it "means" to me. It can "mean" a lot of different things, because I have a lot of state associations, and that's all "meaning" is, state associations. Purely circular, purely personal. We don't need to worry about "meaning".

Oh but yes we do! Because you will constantly say "XYZ has no meaning, so we don't need to worry about that in the conversation!"

Meaning has a lot do with the underlying experiential element of the distinguishing between signal and noise, and hence a lot to do with the "reason" for why things are. One person might hear a certain music as "noise" and have no "feeling" from it. Someone else might think it's hella signal and feel in paradise.

"But what, fundamentally, is that emotional response other than just an association between various conceptual and physiological states? "

The associations have no meaning without a magnitude of dopamine or serotonin or related "release." These are pleasure chemicals. "Who" is feeling the chemicals? Not any one bit, or group of bits, that's for sure.

If there is no indivisible "who" of you outside those bits, you can't experience being alive. You have no soul or spirit. You truly are no different than any other object, vs. a being.

I could collect all the pleasure chemicals from _GURNEYMAN and stuff them in a ziploc bag. No level of sophisticated circuitry will allow me to put some wires into that bag and have the circuitry a sh*t give.

 

"Programmed to reflect a difference" -- a difference between what?

How do I know the difference between Provo, Utah and Salt Lake City, Utah? Having never visited either, everything I know about them I've read somewhere. How does Siri know the difference between Provo and SLC? She read it somewhere, too. What exactly is the difference between me looking up a bunch of words related to both cities and Siri looking up a bunch of words related to both cities?

One obvious difference is that she has a much more reliable short-term memory than I do, and can quote entire passages verbatim. What else?

You're alive and conscious to the point of knowing you exist and knowing what those things are as a being vs. a nonliving object. Siri is not an indivisible "thing." You are. Consciousness is the "amalgamater" which makes "you" something more than a nondescript bag of states that do not KNOW what they are representing in space. If you close your eyes and envision Utah in a spatial format, Siri can't do that and never can, because the thought forms in your head are indivisible, amalgamating phenomena. Utah IS not just a bag of states. Discretized states REFLECT Utah, an actual referential thought form, only when the states can be recognized by something that connects it directly back to the form and not a digital representation. There are no such amalgamated forms in a discrete state machine.

When you close your eyes and look at a "dog" in your head, what you are observing? It's certainly beyond a bit state! It's a stand-alone form!

What about feeling? Humans tend to have emotional responses to the words they read that almost certainly are foreign to Siri. When I read that SLC is the center for the Church of Latter Day Saints, that evokes an emotional response in me. But what, fundamentally, is that emotional response other than just an association between various conceptual and physiological states? If, after reading the Wiki entry for SLC, Siri lights up an LED -- exhibiting an association between conceptual and "physiological" states -- isn't she showing a primitive form of emotion?

Not at all. Emotion is an experience associated with actual documented chemicals, that when not there, the person feels nothing. Lighting up LED's has nothing to do with the experientiality of being.

But we're both fundamentally the same thing: information processors.

Information is ONE component of your being. It is involved with placing your BEING in a state. The BEING is an indivisible form, not a collection of states. It is something *experiencing* state.

There are no binary states in the acoustic waveform, so your claim cannot be true. What is true is that information has been transferred from Wikipedia to Siri's lips to my ears. There's nothing uniquely human about that transfer.

The wave must be DISCRETIZED into digits — digitized, for the discrete machine to do anything with it.

I don't define meaning, and neither do you. No one can, which is why English has like 16 different definitions for "meaning". Meaning is a personal thing, unique to each information processor. And, yes, it is entirely a circular string of states. What Utah "means" to Siri I can never know, just like I can never know what Utah "means" to you. I don't even know what it "means" to me. It can "mean" a lot of different things, because I have a lot of state associations, and that's all "meaning" is, state associations. Purely circular, purely personal. We don't need to worry about "meaning".

I believe it can be arrived at, but only when the 5D fabric is defined, with forms in it, and a connection between those forms and the release of dopamine/serotonin into the soul, which is the person experiencing the release.

 

Any nondescript bit-processing, state-shifting device of n-bit length is nothing more than a telegraphing machine.

It requires the invocation of an undefined “conscious” token for any n-bit output of the device to have any augmented functionality beyond its n-bit output of either high or low voltages which in the end amounts to the ability to light up lightbulbs on a highway billboard, or turn on/off other contraptions.

Life, being, consciousness, reason, reality, truth, knowing, feeling, meaning, desire, personhood, sense, intention, emotion, spirit, soul and many other “built-in” existential tokens lie undefined for a bag of wires hooked to a bag of switches and battery on some kitchen table in a 1-bedroom apartment that we think is telegraphing its “desire” to “know” whether or not a 5D exists.

A state machine makes no distinction between telegraphing 1 state or n states. In fact, whether it functions or not is immaterial, because there is no connection to the machine at any time between any stored state. A CPU is a centralized train station of voltage states that need not exist in close proximity within the chip. No different than telegraphing poles placed across a city. Any “proximity” makes the illusion “someone is home” that much thicker.

At no time would any person point to any one telegraphing pole and say “a person exists here!” Or draw a map and point to multiple poles and say “eventually these poles will evolve to feel, talk, and distinguish between themselves and some thing called reality.”

Curious state processor the human being is, because it has a back-end where it converts multi-media waves of various wavelengths by way of mystery hardware and has software to breakdown each wave into its constituent parts and digitize them into itself, while it seamlessly interrelates the waves to other waves spectrographically to multi-dimensional objects those waves reflect, and feeds this back to itself, all while claiming those objects don’t necessarily exist. It cannot be an n-bit processing machine while also employing stored waves that it will convert to digits that it claims can telegraph whether or not it is.

This is an impossibility to a simple 1D state machine of n-bit length.

 

It's good to try to formalize one's thoughts. Maybe we can tighten them up a bit.

Propositions 1, 2, and 3 have circular definitions: you define E in terms of S and N, and then S and N in terms of E.

Part of your definition of E involves words such as "knowable" and "infinite quantity" that need to be defined first.

You don't qualify what properties S must have for it to be C. Though it's not always necessary to enumerate the properties of something, certain ideas (like consciousness) definitely need it.

A note on notation: the complement of a set S -- i.e., the set of things NOT in S -- is sometimes written as S', so I'd use a different symbol for the set of S with the property C.

That’s good... the goal is to get a clean and tight outline, but more of this stuff needs some more hashing for the next 6-8 years. Props 1, 2, and 3 do have circular definitions by their very nature to some degree.

 

Here’s my proposal for a slight trajectory shift:

Let’s assume a brutally basic starting point that you are not alive nor conscious, and you are a state processor 100% identical to a soft robot Siri Watson 2090 processing hella quantities of bits.

In your brain are high and low voltage state neurons representing discrete bits only.

Let’s assume you’re fully functioning, but that your parts are entirely separated on a kitchen table.

I’m directing a question to one of your ears (microphones):

“Where did the continuous waves ultimately come from, stored in your circuitry as n-bit resolution discrete states, that allow you to reference yourself as a living contiguous unit in space (nature) by vibrating part 328R9 here, that—when the pressure waves it generates are picked up by your ears (microphones)—you convert back to digital states that you claim reflect those waves along with a time-stamp of when you did it? And why do you insist you have a choice to do this at this moment?”

 

Also, you invoke this thing called “nature”:

She obviously is the first order element outside your circuitry. She’s just another state or group of states to you, no?

Or...she’s an “environment”? With raw ingredients and physics? What’s that to a state machine?

WhoTF really is this woman named “nature” to a state processing machine?

Why do you know of her?

Why do you insist you came from her, or that you even have a beginning or end in her?

Where did she get her “waves” from to give you words that reflect her existence and things in her like planets?

 

A state machine fundamentally processes 1D states.

Where is 2D and 3D reality coming from to you, and why do the words you use, like “nature” assume a 3D environment with raw ingredients and physics?

What is the 2D or 3D dog or any other object to you in your mind vs. in nature?

Your entire database of words (and internal thoughts) is largely referencing 2D and 3D physical objects, including yourself as a 3D brain, and assuming their existence in “3D (minimally)” nature, and scientific truth is concerned with knowing those objects’ nature and the physics concerning them. Your words assume existence of identifiable and observable elements above 1D.

You are not exclusively a 1D state processor.

QED.

 

Indivisible in the sense of "classification." Once the wave that represents "Siri" is compromised by pulling wavelings out, you lose the "Siri" wave. Because that wave is defined AS the superposition of the wavelings.

The wave does not represent Siri; the wave carries information, much of it transmitted by Siri. Even this information is not indivisible -- we can, for example, filter from the wave all frequencies below 100 Hz. The resulting wave is certainly different than the original wave -- we've lost some information about the room in the filtering -- but, as Siri's information is encoded in frequencies well above 100 Hz, we haven't affected the information of interest.

So as a state processor, you're asking a very funny question: Where is the dog in the light? Why do you ask such a question? If you "see" the dog, why the question?

Because, as an information processor that's been around a while, I've formed many memories and associations between them that lead me to ask such questions.

Further to this, what good is the endowment of property "consciousness" if you can't define it? Does it have something to do with the question about the dog above?

Consciousness is neither magical nor special, and so not especially important to pin down with a precise definition. Any information processor with a sufficient level of memory and state associations has consciousness. A working definition might be: a processor that actively associates a subset of states with its own functions ("self-awareness") is conscious. A processor that has such capability but is not actively referencing itself is "unconscious". Examples include sleeping humans and CPUs in power-save mode.

Also, for the record, you have absolutely no idea where you came from! You came from your mother. You surmise you came from "nature". No proof = religion. ;=)

I associate "absolutely no idea" with zero probability of knowing. So, are you claiming that I have zero probability of knowing where I cam from? I'm certainly not suggesting that I have 100% perfect knowledge, but I'm pretty damn sure I was born from a set of parents, each of whom was born from a set of parents, and so on. I am pretty sure I can follow this ancestry tree all the way to back single-celled organisms.

This particular hypothesis -- summarized by saying that I came from "nature" -- is profoundly successful at explaining all manner of empircal data. So, unless you have an equally successful or better hypothesis, I will continue to assume I was designed by nature.

I believe there IS a "magic wand" in the human being — but it is not in the discrete state processor by nature of its definition!

Magic wands are notoriously hard to find. Good luck.

And the CPU is not an amalgamating "knower." It's a collection of gates and wires. No one gate or state is aware of any other.

A prime example of your bias. a CPU is filled with states that know about each other; it could not work otherwise!

If I connect one of the inputs of an AND gate to a switch, would you not agree that the state of the gate is dependent on the state of the switch? A CPU amalgamtes billions of such arrangements to produce the very text you are at this moment reading. If the CPU were not aware of its various states, your screen would be black and your CPU would be no different than a rock.

 

Btw, don’t mistake my impassioned half-Italian tone with antagonism or anger toward you or anything else. I get excited over such conversatiom... some of the most engaging I’ve had in years!

 

Oh but yes we do! Because you will constantly say "XYZ has no meaning, so we don't need to worry about that in the conversation!"

Sigh. We need the words we use in this discourse to have shared meaning, otherwise we cannot communicate. That is entirely different from having to define "meaning" within the model. I know that you know the difference.

Meaning has a lot do with the underlying experiential element of the distinguishing between signal and noise, and hence a lot to do with the "reason" for why things are. One person might hear a certain music as "noise" and have no "feeling" from it. Someone else might think it's hella signal and feel in paradise.

That kind of "meaning" has importance in a theory of aesthetics or a theory of semiotics, but I'm pretty sure we're not trying to address either of those things in this model.

The associations have no meaning without a magnitude of dopamine or serotonin or related "release."

WTF?!? Dopamine and serotonin are the keys that unlock meaning, consciousness, reason, and everything that's special about humans? I don't even know what to say.

I suppose we could note that birds, lizards, and even insects regulate brain function with dopamine and serotonin. Presumably you don't think cockroaches are on the same level of consciousness or reason or whatever as humans, right? So, something else is responsible for making human the Great Amalgamater. In which case, why bring up neurotransmitters in the first place?

Note that, whatever role dopamine and serotonin play in neuro regulation, we could easily program analogous functions into a CPU. Indeed, the biomolecular behavior of dopamine and serotonin is entirely deterministic and programmatic. The dopaminergic and seratonergic roles of pleasure and pain in worms are not much different than calling the feelPleasure() and feelPain() functions in a robot. And the only difference, I contend, between the worm's pleasure and pain and the human's pleasure and pain, is that the human has a lot more state associations to make both pleasure and pain richer experiences.

If there is no indivisible "who" of you outside those bits, you can't experience being alive. You have no soul or spirit. You truly are no different than any other object, vs. a being.

I don't believe in soul or spirit, so that's perfectly fine with me. I am different from other similar information processors only in that my states are not identical to theirs, a function of having had different experiences (and slightly different genetic design).

 

Btw, don’t mistake my impassioned half-Italian tone with antagonism or anger toward you or anything else. I get excited over such conversatiom... some of the most engaging I’ve had in years!

Likewise! I welcome impassioned debate; the passion shows me that you deeply care, and that's inspiring to me. Plus, I don't bruise easily.

Similarly, if I seem exasperated or respond in some sh!tty tone, please know that I do so only because I, too, am passionate and take this conversation and the things you say seriously. Regardless of any differences in idealogical stances, I have great respect and admiration for you for exploring them openly.

 

Sigh. We need the words we use in this discourse to have shared meaning, otherwise we cannot communicate. That is entirely different from having to define "meaning" within the model. I know that you know the difference.


That kind of "meaning" has importance in a theory of aesthetics or a theory of semiotics, but I'm pretty sure we're not trying to address either of those things in this model.


WTF?!? Dopamine and serotonin are the keys that unlock meaning, consciousness, reason, and everything that's special about humans? I don't even know what to say.

I suppose we could note that birds, lizards, and even insects regulate brain function with dopamine and serotonin. Presumably you don't think cockroaches are on the same level of consciousness or reason or whatever as humans, right? So, something else is responsible for making human the Great Amalgamater. In which case, why bring up neurotransmitters in the first place?

Note that, whatever role dopamine and serotonin play in neuro regulation, we could easily program analogous functions into a CPU. Indeed, the biomolecular behavior of dopamine and serotonin is entirely deterministic and programmatic. The dopaminergic and seratonergic roles of pleasure and pain in worms are not much different than calling the feelPleasure() and feelPain() functions in a robot. And the only difference, I contend, between the worm's pleasure and pain and the human's pleasure and pain, is that the human has a lot more state associations to make both pleasure and pain richer experiences.


I don't believe in soul or spirit, so that's perfectly fine with me. I am different from other similar information processors only in that my states are not identical to theirs, a function of having had different experiences (and slightly different genetic design).

You might think this strange, but I do actually think humans have the same degree of consciousness as a cockroach or any other living earth-bound creature that _EXPERIENCES. Just turn on the TV. Lol. I just think cockroaches don’t have as refined an appearance as humans, and humans are higher-level information processors driven by a 5D component that is projecting an illusion of sorts. More bits in the human than the cockroach, cat, or dog.

 

You're alive and conscious to the point of knowing you exist and knowing what those things are as a being vs. a nonliving object. Siri is not an indivisible "thing." You are.

No where has it been shown that I am indivisible. If you cut my brain up I die, but so does Siri if we cut her CPU up. More still, there are many aspects of me that certainly seem divisible. My personality is not some indivisible unit -- I have greedy parts, generous parts, sad parts, joyous parts. What, exactly, is indivisible in me?

Consciousness is the "amalgamater" which makes "you" something more than a nondescript bag of states that do not KNOW what they are representing in space.

I do not know what I am representing in space. So, am I not conscious? My brain is the amalgamater of all my experiences. It emulsifies and integrates all my sensory data into perception, it coalesces all these perceptions into a running memory of states, and builds deeply nested associations between all the different parts. The end result of all that amalgamation is the "feeling" of my experience. I have no doubt that my experience feels very different than Siri's experience, but we are both experiencing in our own way. We are both conscious.

If you close your eyes and envision Utah in a spatial format, Siri can't do that and never can, because the thought forms in your head are indivisible, amalgamating phenomena.

Of course Siri can do that. What makes you think she can't? Seriously. I can program a computer to "envision" anything I want it to. What we call a "thought" is just a biomolecular arrangement of state. It is as divisible as the electromagnetic arrangment of state in Siri's RAM. In fact, neurologists have famously shown this: by applying electrical impulses to certain sections of a conscious patient's brain, the patient spontaneously "tasted chocolate" or "remembered her mother's smell".

Utah IS not just a bag of states. Discretized states REFLECT Utah, an actual referential thought form, only when the states can be recognized by something that connects it directly back to the form and not a digital representation. There are no such amalgamated forms in a discrete state machine.

How do you think that the representation of Utah get recognized by the brain? It matches the representation with other states that are stored in its memory looking for a match. That's exactly what Siri does, too. You're trying to elevate pattern detection to some extra-natural status, but it's really one of the most basic things a state machine can do.

When you close your eyes and look at a "dog" in your head, what you are observing? It's certainly beyond a bit state! It's a stand-alone form!

The f*ck it is! If I close my eyes and imagine a dog, I definitely couldn't draw what I'm imagining because the image keeps changing. There is no single embodiment of "dog" that I can imagine, so my brain starts grabbing a bunch of "dog memories", most unrelated to each other. Try it! Unless you're imagining a very specific photograph of a dog, you won't be able to hold any "dog" as a stand-alone form.

Not at all. Emotion is an experience associated with actual documented chemicals, that when not there, the person feels nothing. Lighting up LED's has nothing to do with the experientiality of being.

The proper way to say it is "animal emotion is an experience associated with chemicals." So, are you contending that only animals can feel emotion? If so, then there's no point in discussing it, as you've closed the topic by definition.

I, on the other hand, prefer to treat "emotion" at face value and not impose arbitrary restrictions. If a human can feel emotion, then so probably can a dog. And if a dog can feel emotion, then so probably can a bird. And if a bird can feel emotion, so probably can a lizard. And so on. Where does it stop? If I think about what emotion reflects in all those different animals, I conclude that emotion is a complex association of states to a basic attraction/repulsion phenomenon. Amoebas feel some level of emotion. And since CPUs can be programmed for attraction/repulsion, and they can be programmed to have complex associations, I contend that CPUs can feel emotion.

Information is ONE component of your being. It is involved with placing your BEING in a state. The BEING is an indivisible form, not a collection of states. It is something *experiencing* state.

I claim that BEING is the collection of states that comprise an information processor. What's your definition of BEING?

The wave must be DISCRETIZED into digits — digitized, for the discrete machine to do anything with it.

The acoustical wave in the room is fundamentally discrete, but it is neither a binary nor digital sequence.

 

Any nondescript bit-processing, state-shifting device of n-bit length is nothing more than a telegraphing machine.

Provably wrong! Indeed, the profound difference between a telegraph and a CPU is one of the most fundamental aspects of computer science. We can quantify precisely the computational power of an information processor. A processor like a telegraph has extremely limited computational power, and so we would never expect a telegraph to do much more than shift simple states.

However, when a machine reaches a certain level of complexity, it attains the computational power of a Turing machine. Questions of quantum computing aside, there is no greater computational power. Both brains and CPUs have the computational power of a Turing machine, thus both brains and CPUs -- as nondescript bit processors -- are fundamentally much more than telegraphs. It is this much moreness that leads to the interesting stuff.

It requires the invocation of an undefined “conscious” token for any n-bit output of the device to have any augmented functionality beyond its n-bit output of either high or low voltages which in the end amounts to the ability to light up lightbulbs on a highway billboard, or turn on/off other contraptions.

You say functionality beyond turning on light bulbs. But CPUs do far more than turn on light bulbs, no? You seem to want to say that humans have functionality that CPUs cannot have. What exactly are those functionalities?

Please do not say "feel pain/joy/whatever like a human", because that's a tautology; CPUs are not humans. Please speak to the specific functionality that are uniquely human but not "human by definition".

A state machine makes no distinction between telegraphing 1 state or n states. In fact, whether it functions or not is immaterial, because there is no connection to the machine at any time between any stored state.

Demonstrably false. It is easy to design a telegraph that counts the bits in each message it sends, and counts how many messages it has sent. It is easy to design the telegraph to make distinctions based on any of these counts -- a red light comes on if only m < n bits of an n-bit message has been sent. A green light comes on if all n bits have been sent. The telegraph is making distinctions. How can you possibly disagree?

At no time would any person point to any one telegraphing pole and say “a person exists here!” Or draw a map and point to multiple poles and say “eventually these poles will evolve to feel, talk, and distinguish between themselves and some thing called reality.”

Telegraphs are not Turing-complete, so we don't expect much from them. But, using your analogy, can you point to a section of your brain's visual cortex and say "a person exists here!"?

Curious state processor the human being is, because it has a back-end where it converts multi-media waves of various wavelengths by way of mystery hardware and has software to breakdown each wave into its constituent parts and digitize them into itself, while it seamlessly interrelates the waves to other waves spectrographically to multi-dimensional objects those waves reflect, and feeds this back to itself, all while claiming those objects don’t necessarily exist. It cannot be an n-bit processing machine while also employing stored waves that it will convert to digits that it claims can telegraph whether or not it is.

This is an impossibility to a simple 1D state machine of n-bit length.

No idea what you're trying to say here.

 

Props 1, 2, and 3 do have circular definitions by their very nature to some degree.

Circular definitions need to removed. The easiest way to do this is to axiomitize one or more of the definitions, and then use the axioms to derive the others.

Axioms should be simple, general, and easy to swallow. An example of a bad axiom would be "Consciousness is that which makes humans different from other animals."