Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

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> So you're claiming that organisms such as ourselves cannot be run on a Turing machine? Any particular reason/evidence?

This is just my thinking: a turing machine, or equivalently a digital circuit, doesn't want anything. It's an artificial construct, effectively a simulation, that can exist as an abstract mathematical idea.

If there is a real world where real stuff happens, real things have their own goals - generally increasing entropy or minimizing energy. Although it seems like we should just be able to capture this mathematically, in doing so, we remove the actual desire... this sounds a bit nutty maybe, but what else is the difference between reality and simulation? An abstract calculation, anything equivalent to a Turing machine has no skin in the game. Something happened in the universe does - and this could include conciousness, as a property of matter, which for example could be effectively sum of the compulsions of the composing matter to minimize their energy (you can look this up, there are theories about conciousness that posit it's a property of matter).

If there is no difference between reality and a simulation, I'm wrong, we can all be represented on a universal computer, and so as abstract math, and in some sense existence is meaningless it just follows from math. My experience doesn't support this, but presumably I would have evolved a blind spot if my existence actually was meaningless.

TLDR, I think there is some undiscovered difference between reality and simulation, that I would guess relates to desire / conciousness, that means we can't simulate conciousness or real intelligence

I'm a scientist, I know the above doesn't withstand any scrutiny, I'm just trying to share my speculation because you asked

Any simulation or program we run exists in the same reality that your mind does. In what way does the type of hardware that a program is running on (flesh vs. silicon) have an impact the reality of the desires running on that hardware?

It basically sounds like you are saying that you think souls exist, are necessary for consciousness, and can't inhabit non meat based entities.

Personally, I believe the exact opposite. I believe math exists independently of the human mind (except possibly infinity), isn't something we invented, and can fully describe reality. As such, every (finite) mathematical system has an existence and thus so does every simulation described by such a system (thus the existence of our reality.)

I think that it is very hard to justify why one such simulation (our reality) exists and others do not. I think it is similarly hard to justify why a system running on meat could have a soul while while a system running on silicon can't. A system running on silicon is composed of the same base constituents as a human brain (electrons, protons, neutrons, etc) and thus any propensity for consciousness that exists in the human mind but can't in silicon imples that consciousness arises from something besides these building block.

I don't actually think that we can simulate a human mind on anything remotely like our current computers for architectural reasons (namely latency and parallelism). I think that any minds that can run on silicon will be different from ours in fundemental ways, but won't be any less real than ours.

> If there is no difference between reality and a simulation

That's the crux, I guess. There's this ‘Matrix’ idea that the universe might be a simulation, but here we have a much weaker, more plausible property; I would describe it as: could real-world processes be simulated exactly? That's what I meant by ‘can be run on a Turing machine’: is the organism equivalent to a simulated version.

Two quick addenda:

(i) This doesn't require the hypothetical Turing machine to exist; as you said, it's an abstract idea. In the strict sense, where it can have potentially unlimited memory, a Turing machine can't exist in the real world. Even so, we can ask whether an entity that has wants/needs/desires can exist in a Turing machine in theory. If yes, it's easier to show that it can exist in practice, in reality.

(ii) Maybe physics is non-deterministic and the equivalent mathematical model requires a non-deterministic Turing machine or something else still. But whatever physics does can be done by a physical computer; I believe there's nothing a natural person can think that can't in principle also be thought by an artificial machine.

There has got to be a difference between the pain a real ER patient feels and the simulation a training dummy for medical students is running. It's just so hard to come up with a clear definition of that difference. Let's try something simpler.

“When squeezed, Elmo shakes, vibrates, and recites his trademark giggle, "Uh-ha-ha-ha-hee-hee!".” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickle_Me_Elmo

Elmo isn't really giggling. But I think it's possible for a digital circuit to ‘get’ a joke. Or, indeed, to be ticklish.

As shkkmo mentioned, one could just postulate the existence of a ‘soul’ and be done with it. I'd prefer something more rigorous; something falsifiable.

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