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My take on why indeed the study of consciousness may not be as simple

PixyMisa said:
You have a screen and a keyboard and CP/M. You've never heard of "Blue Brain". What CPU are you running on?
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Still the "Blue Brain", I guess, because the reality of the actual hardware is not changed by the user's perception, and in this case the perception appears limited in understanding what really is processing those typos....lol.

that is, it matters not, except to the personal experience of the user, who only is accessing the CP/M virtualisation of the "Blue Brain"....maybe?

And how did you guess, I've never heard of a Blue Brain either, perhaps I'm needing to get out more.....lol;)

No. One of the most important properties of system virtualisation is that programs running under the virtual system have no way of telling that the system is virtual. To the programmer and to the program, you're on a Z80.
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I agree with you, that seems right.

I do, however draw perhaps an old fashioned, but i think valid, distinction between hardware and software.

to entirely see the point you make, I have to make some compromises that perhaps are valid, but to me , limit the physical reality that exists regardless.

Like, there's no actual z80 in fact, just the BB acting like one.

Though why it would beats me...........lol

am i close, or no cigar...?
 
Robin said:
They certainly do. But do they, themselves say that their claims are supernatural?
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Depends on who makes the claim; some will claim that PEAR's findings are scientific, others that they are supernatural.

The point is that PEAR, Sheldrake, and homeopathy all contradict established scientific fact at so many levels without any evidence that they actually work. So we classify them as supernatural even if their adherents do not, and they qualify for the million dollar challenge.

That doesn't apply to what DrKitten and I are talking about. This is established scientific fact.
 
biomorph said:
I agree with you, that seems right.

I do, however draw perhaps an old fashioned, but i think valid, distinction between hardware and software.
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Yep, it's valid. My point is not that it's wrong to say that it's Blue Brain running Pong, but rather that it's a matter of perspective, and depending on your perspective there is more than one right answer.

For example, if all we have access to is the Z80 simulation, we can easily see that it is running Pong. If we're looking at Blue Brain itself, we can see that it's running a simulation of another computer architecture, but there's no way to tell that it's running Pong without traversing the stack of simulations. From that pespective, also valid, Blue Brain isn't running Pong.
 
PixyMisa said:
Yep, it's valid. My point is not that it's wrong to say that it's Blue Brain running Pong, but rather that it's a matter of perspective, and depending on your perspective there is more than one right answer.

For example, if all we have access to is the Z80 simulation, we can easily see that it is running Pong. If we're looking at Blue Brain itself, we can see that it's running a simulation of another computer architecture, but there's no way to tell that it's running Pong without traversing the stack of simulations. From that pespective, also valid, Blue Brain isn't running Pong.
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And from a third perspective, I notice that the monitor attached to Blue Brain shows a Pong game, and conclude that Blue Brain is running Pong.

All three perspectives are correct.
 
Robin said:
If you don't know about it then it isn't there?
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No, but if you don't know about it you don't know about it.

You can't look at a the screen of a CP/M system and say whether it's running on a physical Z80 or an eZ80 in compatibility mode or a hardware emulator or a virtualised Z80 on a hardware Z80 or a register-level simulated Z80 or a JIT Z80 to VLIW compiler. Z80-ness is defined functionally.

(That is, in principle. In practice, abstractions leak. If your Z80 performs at the the equivalent of 1GHz then you can safely assume that some sort of recompilation is in effect.)
 
PixyMisa said:
Depends on who makes the claim; some will claim that PEAR's findings are scientific, others that they are supernatural.
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Yep.
The point is that PEAR, Sheldrake, and homeopathy all contradict established scientific fact at so many levels without any evidence that they actually work. So we classify them as supernatural even if their adherents do not, and they qualify for the million dollar challenge.

That doesn't apply to what DrKitten and I are talking about. This is established scientific fact.
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That a desk checked algorithm will create a real human consciousness, just as you are experiencing right now?

You are claiming that this is scientific fact?

Drkitten is currently trying to pretend that you are saying something else, so I would like to get you to confirm that this is exactly what you are saying.
 
Robin said:
Drkitten is currently trying to pretend that you are saying something else, so I would like to get you to confirm that this is exactly what you are saying.
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Yes, that's right. I'm cunningly pretending I'm saying something else by using words with well-defined meanings that you don't even try to understand. Egad, what a cunning debater I am.

Next up, Robin will explain why a person is fat because the treadmill in his house is cunningly pretending to be a sofa.
 
Robin said:
Yep.

That a desk checked algorithm will create a real human consciousness, just as you are experiencing right now?

You are claiming that this is scientific fact?
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Are you claiming that it isn't?

It's not experimentally proven, for obvious reasons; it's derived from the laws of physics and mathematics, and verified in principle by countless simpler simulations.

If you have something more than the argument from personal incredulity to dispute this, by all means present it.
 
Robin said:
PixyMisa said:
That doesn't apply to what DrKitten and I are talking about. This is established scientific fact.
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That a desk checked algorithm will create a real human consciousness, just as you are experiencing right now?

You are claiming that this is scientific fact?
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Don't look astounded. This is something that Pixy genuinely believes. And hes absolutely right...provided you're using his own personal definition of conciousness :rolleyes:
 
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PixyMisa said:
Yep, it's valid. My point is not that it's wrong to say that it's Blue Brain running Pong, but rather that it's a matter of perspective, and depending on your perspective there is more than one right answer.
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i'm not sure there is more than one right answer, just that from the z80 perspective, there is an answer, however due to shall we say, a restriction of all the answer in full, the z80 perpsective is not entire.

At that point the programmer is not misled, just uninformed.

For example, if all we have access to is the Z80 simulation, we can easily see that it is running Pong. If we're looking at Blue Brain itself, we can see that it's running a simulation of another computer architecture, but there's no way to tell that it's running Pong without traversing the stack of simulations. From that pespective, also valid, Blue Brain isn't running Pong.
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true, via this thing you call perspective, or perhaps perception, which has not all the facts, as you rightly pointed out in your vitrualisation bit earlier..

however it assumes it matters, I'm not sure it does.

what i'm getting at is it isn't either/or, but a question that regardless of the limit of the z80 user's ability to "percieve" the BB, reality eventually hands you the whole package, given a little more info is available to the programmer..

In real life of course, the rest of the answer is available, and the z80 is seen for what it is.

that is not to say I'm saying there are no limits, I don't know..... but we see the BB perhaps, or at least some of the emulators......?
 
AkuManiMani said:
Don't look astounded. This is something that Pixy genuinely believes. And hes absolutely right...provided you're using his own personal definition of conciousness :rolleyes:
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Well, if you've got a better definition of consciousness that you would prefer to use, you're welcome to present it. I bet Pixy will take fewer than ten lines to shred your definition beyond repair.
 
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