oct0524 footnotes

Footnotes

1 At least I'm told it's a Navajo proverb by John Perry Barlow.
2 Zombies have no internal experience. They are unconscious, but give no obvious externally measurable evidence of that fact. Zombies have played a distinguished role as fodder in the rhetoric around the mind/body problem and consciousness research. There has been much debate about whether a true zombie could exist, or if internal subjective experience inevitably colors either outward behavior or events in the brain in some way.
3 Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained and many other zombie manifestos.
4 Dennett calls his thought experiments "intuition pumps".
5 The meaning of the term consciousness has been subjected to a tug-of-war lately. It used to mean "subjective, ineffable experience", and now it might mean "a part of a program that models other parts and can exercise executive control". I like to use the word "experience" to refer to the subjective experience of experience, which is the thing that makes consciousness into a hard problem.
6 The term "computer" can mean a number of things. For the purpose of this paper, "computer" will mean a practical object that can exist, such as a Macintosh. The Church-Turing Hypothesis suggests that there is a ceiling of capability above which no computer made of ordinary materials can rise. This ceiling is defined by an "ideal computer", called a Turing Machine, which is like an ordinary computer, but with infinite memory. The hypothesis is treated, in general, as a truth by computer scientists. Penrose and others are interested in quantum computation because it might result in a computer that does more than a Turing Machine can. The Church-Turing Hypothesis "trickles down" in most debates about consciousness to a similar assertion that as finite computers become very large, they should be treated increasingly as being functionally equivalent to each other. This is why the brain is seen by many as a large computer. If either the pure or trickled hypotheses turn out to be false, nothing in these arguments really changes; the bar is simply raised to a new level corresponding to the new ideal computer.
7 "Object code" is the kind of program that a computer operates from, as opposed to source code, which is written by people. Source code has to be converted into object code before a computer can do anything. Each different kind of computer uses a different, incompatible type of object code. DNA is understood by some biologists as a type of object code. A computer without any object code to run is inert, as is a specimen of code for which the proper computer cannot be found. I am here suggesting that any arbitrary piece of nature might turn out to be object code for some possible computer.
8 Two different pieces of object code can have exactly the same effect, and are said to be two different implementations of the same program. From a functionalist viewpoint, the two are identical. For example, if two versions of a program behave identically on Macintosh and Windows machines, there are then two different pieces of object code that are functionally equivalent. From a functionalist standpoint, there could be many different pieces of object code, running on the same or different computers, that could be equivalent to your brain. I am here suggesting a particular one, which happens to be a meteor shower.
9 You could trivially construct a computer to treat any sufficiently large data set as object code to emulate any program simply by including a big "lookup table". A lookup table would simply map whatever data you found into the data you want (which in this case would be object code to run your brain). This feels like cheating. It seems as though it isn't magical enough. To get magical, we'd need to construct a computer that doesn't have any information built in to it that reflects advanced knowledge of your brain. Fine. Then you have to search through the space of possible computers (defined here as finite state machines) until you find the first one that works properly. Finding such a computer is similar to cracking a very, very large cryptographic code. It might not be practical, but it is theoretically possible. If zombies wish to dispute this, they'll have to join ranks with Penrose and seek a fabulous quantum element in the brain that would cause it to evade such a search.
10 There could be many different computers that each interpret the same meteor shower data as a different brain, thus giving this arbitrary bit of nature a very rich inner life.
11 An emulation is a program running on a computer that simulates the existence of another computer. For instance, Macintosh computers can run emulators that seem to be IBM-type machines "living inside" the physical Macintosh. A Macintosh could also certainly run a program that simulates a copy of itself. There is a potential problem of an infinite regress, of course, but that can be easily avoided in my example by having the emulation be incomplete; it will not include a further interior emulation of itself.
12 It might be "effected" if you turned off your measuring instruments, but it will not be perturbed by the status of your computer that runs the data as a program. Even Schrodinger's cat wouldn't be affected by THAT computer.
13 If you try this argument on zombies this is the point at which they suddenly renounce functionalism.
14 I'm assuming that our Martian's instruments can record the internal states of the transistors in the computer's chips.
15 Other fields of science like chemistry and biology are also not needed to explain the observed universe, but those frameworks of understanding are recognized to function only within limited parameters. No one would claim that chemistry alone can explain the Sun's source of energy, for instance. Because of its limited scope, chemistry isn't ontologically challenging while physics, being necessary, is. I believe that this is the reason so many physicists end up as zagnets.
16 The secret to finding functioning computers (not just free-standing programs) wherever you look is in choosing pieces of the universe which are exerting influence on one another over time (this isn't hard). For instance, in my large meteor shower, all the meteors exert some gravitational pull on each other, so they are causally linked. If you searched hard enough, you could find a computer which read the relative motions of the meteors over a specific period of time as a record of the changing states of many minds, and the process of communication between them. In this case, an alien could not only find a computer program in a meteor shower, but a tangibly functional one.
Zombies sometimes object to this argument by saying that a "real" computer doesn't have to know what it will do in advance, while my constructed computers do. This is a remarkable argument, because it asserts that deterministic computers exercise a mystical kind of free will. Or Zombies might argue that computers are different from meteor showers because they have a special, practical relationship with their surroundings. These kinds of arguments are touching because they are a rehashing of the most sentimental old zagnet arguments for the specialness of people.
17 It should be pointed out that many objects which aren't needed for an understanding of the universe can still be detected by instruments. An example would be chemicals (since chemistry is a theoretically unneeded, though immensely practical, layer of abstraction above physics). This suggests an ontological spectrum reflecting the dispensability of things. Chemicals could be said to "exist" more than computers do, and energy to exist even more, since it is both measurable and a less dispensable concept.
18 I've decided to use the word "infinity" in the vernacular sense in parts of this essay to make it more accessible to non-technical readers. It should be taken to mean "unbounded".
19 Zombies, changing the rules of the game, might suggest that we could detect a computer objectively by redefining it as the "best fitting" or "most efficient" finite state machine to explain the behavior of a selected piece of the universe (in this case the piece we call a computer). Accordingly, aliens would recognize our computers because our interpretation is in fact the best one available, and all who seek will arrive at approximately the same point of view. I think schemes such as this are really only hiding some step in which human guidance would be needed (not because humans have the best point of view, but because we don't). Obviously there is the matter of selecting a piece of the universe, which in itself might be the conveyor of "semantics". Even if the aliens can choose the right slice without human assistance, this problem is different from the meteor shower example above. In that problem, we searched for a particular computer, but in this one we'd have to find the best possible computer that included as much as possible of the meteor shower. In other words, we'd have to look at all of the computers hiding in nature instead of just finding one of them. This gives us an unbounded problem instead of a large finite one. It is just like hoping for an algorithm that you could feed a bunch of data into and then be rewarded with the best possible scientific theory to explain the data.
20 I was both bolstered and disappointed (I wanted to publish this idea first!) to learn that Searle has also argued that computation is not intrinsic to nature, in "The Rediscovery of the Mind". Searle's position is actually a little different from mine, in that he doesn't entirely dismiss the idea that some kind of computer could have an objective existence in the right context, and he doesn't view computers as being similar to other phantoms like language.
21 And I would say they're even worse dualists. My dualism is cleanly defined by the existence of two different epistemological channels, the empirical and the subjective. Theirs is cloaked in weird fantasies of imaginary objects like information with undefined properties like "semantics".
22 I am told by my friends who have experimented with psychedelics they have experienced this correlation, where every aspect of experience is radically altered by changes in the physical brain. What is notable to me is that experience itself continues during these radical "trips". This is, once again, why I choose to use the word "experience" instead of "consciousness". Consciousness is something which is said to exist in altered states, where experience is a thing, as I understand it, without state.
23 As this essay demonstrates.
24 See my essay "Agents of Alienation".
25 Or Penrose's quantum computations.
26 I'm not suggesting a "free-will" or conscious kind of choice. It is rather an implicit choice that has been made in the act of perception.
27 Vector fields are the mathematical way of expressing the continuous aspect of the universe.
28 Does subjectivity disappear if you're thorough enough? This is what some zombies believe. If enough well-instrumented alien scientists studied enough situations on Earth, would they eventually weed out, perhaps relying on an evolutionary process, all of the possible but more awkward interpretations of what's going on here? Would they eventually "parse" our world the way we do, into people with brains using words to refer to objects, because that interpretation is the easiest? This is similar to the idea addressed in footnote 19. I would argue that aliens who learn to think like us must have cheated and gotten a hint or two to find their way.
Some recent speculation concerned with "Complexity", coming from Stuart Kaufman, Brian Goodwin, and other, suggests that forms in the universe are limited to a far smaller variety than we might have thought, following the contours of a new class of mathematical objects, such as the "catastrophes". What I currently think is that even if this turns out to be right, it doesn't mean that the number of possible "layers of abstraction" would be similarly reduced. A limited variety of territories does not imply a limited number of maps. In fact, this thinking might be very compatible with the idea of the objective universe stated here ("an affinity for a particular infinity of possible slicings").
29 Zombies will probably ask whether there is one dial per person, or one for the universe. I would reply that dials exist in "epistemological space" not physical space, so that question is not sensible.