Tim Scarfe: prediction

Transcript context

…I suppose there's a lot to interpret there. I mean, if we're saying, is there like a mental, anything non physical that is if we take physical to mean something that interacts directly with the physical world and is not sort of I suppose the advantage of doing that all conceivable worlds thing is I don't need to talk about physical and non physical. And I like that because then I can entertain ideas of magical worlds or whatever, but beside the point. I'm not saying that consciousness isn't a thing, or that it's an illusion. I'm saying that if we can sort of enumerate a bunch, explain a whole lot of the features consciousness as a necessary consequence of just the state of the environment changing from 1 to another in all possible worlds, all conceivable worlds. And if 1 accepts that my description of a conscious organism without having said that anything is just physical or whatever is compelling then there is no conceivable world where you can have something that is as intelligent and acts the way that I do without being conscious. The conscious is a necessary adaptation, and that the idea of information processing without consciousness implausible. Yes. Very good. Very good. So you are saying basically that it is it is just something that happens when you have configurations along the lines that you are describing. I guess, in a way, I can't challenge you because you're already saying they need to be biological and and like, you know, physical and real and so because I mean, my my obvious retort to that would be, well, a computer simulation of those things obviously wouldn't be conscious. But you're not really saying that, are you? No. There's 1 question that at the end of my thesis, sort of arm and arm about. Because it's like, I like this question. I like that I couldn't figure this out, because it's fun to think about. So that tapestry of valence I mentioned, with all the cells getting pushed this way and that, and you can sort of say that a conscious state is a tapestry of valence. Now, if I simulate a bunch of cells and give it a tapestry of valence and all the necessary ingredients like the first and second and third order cells I only talked about the first order cells just before, but you can keep scaling the system up and getting predictions of predictions of predictions of stuff. And if you get all the necessary ingredients for consciousness and you just simulate it in a computer, there is 2 possibilities. 1, either a conscious state has to be realized at a point in time by 1 state of the environment, or it doesn't. If it does have to be realized by a state of the environment, that is to say all of the parts of the conscious state are at the exact same moment there. And in the formalism, that is a much clearer statement, but well then it's just humans and organisms and highly distributed. You could make a nanobot swarm that's conscious, but you can't make a single thread CPU conscious, because it's not really doing all this at once. Right? It's kinda looking at a thing, program counter sort of loads something into a register, does some stuff, shuffles some stuff around. It's spread smeared over time. And so the idea is that smearing consciousness over time would kinda kill it. The other possibility is that how the how the would we know? Am I allowed to swear on this?…

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