From: ken@iat.holonet.net (Ken Easlon)
Subject: Re: The Easlon Test
Organization: HoloNet National Internet Access BBS: 510-704-1058/modem
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 23:42:12 GMT



In private correspondence, lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Lincoln Carr)
writes:

>If we apperceive mental phenomena, mustn't there be a "real" hardware
>underlying the phenomena?  I am not claiming that we will ever know
>anything about the hardware, but only the fact that THERE MUST BE HARDWARE
>at some level. 

I'm going to respond to this from two different perspectives, philosophical
and practical.

First, philosophical.  The hardware underlying our perception of reality
could be real, as in neurons and quarks, or the hardware could be
simulated.  Again we take a ride on the infinite loop.  Surely there must
be some point at which the successive orders of simulation stop.  Or is
there?

Consider the infinite superhelix.  Imagine the bass string of a guitar, a
little tiny helix of steel wrapped around an inner string.  Now take a good
long length of bass string and wind it into a larger helix, like an old
fashioned spring on a screen door.  Now take a long length of this spring
and wind it into a larger helix, like the suspension springs of an
automobile.  Take a long automobile spring and wind it into a larger helix,
and so on.  

At the other end, imagine looking at the guitar string under a microscope. 
You discover that the little tiny helix is not made of steel after all, but
appears to be wound from an even smaller helix, which is would from and
even smaller helix, and so on.

I say the infinite superhelix is an imaginable concept, and yet there's
nothing there you can get your hands on. It's not a concept of a "thing",
but a concept of a coordinate system.  A set of directions for focusing the
attention.  You can do the same thing with cartesian coordinates, a grid
within a grid within a grid, etc.

In order to imagine a coordinate system, or a mathematical concept like a
point or a line, we have to give some flesh to the concept.  We imagine a
point as a small mark, a period.  

When we are asked to describe the location of the point, we quote a string
a numbers, each number having a specific resolution or degree of precision
or number of digits.  When we are dealing with high resolution concepts we
use long numbers and imagine our point "mark" as being very very small.

Not to put too fine a point on it :-), what I'm saying here is that our
scientific view of the universe is a concept.  We flesh out the concept by
imagining a little piece of solid material for the ultimate building blocks
(quarks?), but we know that one day we'll have to use more resolution and
imagine even smaller building blocks.


Now for the practical perspective.  My purpose in imagining life as a
computer simulation is to get a handle on how I might go about programming
a computer to emulate consciousness.  If the computer consciousness is
going to live in a simulated environment, then I need to imagine what it's
like to live in a simulated environment.

For my environment to seem real, the simulation must obey certain rules. 
It must interact with my conscious effort to probe and study it in such a
way as to create the illusion of reality.  Also, it must have a life of its
own, giving me the sense that there is a power out there, much greater than
the puny power of my own consciousness.  From a scientific perspective, I
would like to be able to make a model of this external power, and figure
out what rules it obeys, if any.

Our model of external power (and internal power) can be theological,
scientific, mystical or whatever works.  For the purposes of computerizing
consciousness, the model should be one that can be programmed on a computer
i.e. mathematical.

The task of interpreting subjective experience in purely mathematical terms
is no trivial matter, and there are those who say it can't be done. 
Myself, I have gone some distance along that path, and believe that I can
describe a great deal of my subjective experience in mathematical terms.
But I still have a way to go before I've addressed the entirety of my
subjective experience.

Is there an ultimate material basis for reality? I say probably not.  But
the rules of life do appear to have some degree of consistency, there is
indeed an APPEARANCE of truth that we appear to approach as we act out our
quest for knowledge.  If we can come up with some way of describing this
appearance of truth in terms of a program running on a material computer,
that's good enough for me.  

The mathematical model will never be perfect, our other mental models will
never be perfect, and we can never rule out the possibility that we are
completely wrong.  For this reason I tend to keep an open mind about such
concepts as ultimate reality or material reality, maybe they exist, maybe
they don't.  

In practice, we do have a common sense view of reality that helps us stay
in the game.  We also have a consensus reality, a mental model of ourselves
in the world, that we can refer to when communicating.  Call it objective
reality and I won't object.  Say it's not mental, and you might get another
dissertation.  

--
Ken Easlon
ken@holonet.net



Xref: sparky comp.ai.philosophy:7113 sci.logic:2466