RE: Where is the information stored?
January 20, 2015 at 3:04 pm
(This post was last modified: January 20, 2015 at 3:11 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
The "universal mind" would need a specific structure and a persistent architecture to achieve computation as we know it. It doesn't seem to have either of those things as a whole, even though little pieces of it do seem to have them.
As an analogy, imagine what would happen to your computer if I was constantly moving the busses, constantly shifting around the gates on the cpu and breaking and reforming connections. Now imagine what would happen if I removed all of the bussing and gates, and just fed energy into, around, and across the computer. How much computation do you think it would achieve? The question being asked, simply, is whether or not "the universe" provides an adequate architecture for computation-as-mind (an even loftier loftier task than "just computation".. I think the answer is no, personally (if it were yes..it would be difficult to see why we needed computers, we ought to be able to pluck the computation out of the air..literally). Don't get me wrong, the requirements for computation are sometimes suprisingly low, but they do exist - and "being really big and having alot of stuff in it" doesn't actually get something any closer to meeting those requirements.
As an analogy, imagine what would happen to your computer if I was constantly moving the busses, constantly shifting around the gates on the cpu and breaking and reforming connections. Now imagine what would happen if I removed all of the bussing and gates, and just fed energy into, around, and across the computer. How much computation do you think it would achieve? The question being asked, simply, is whether or not "the universe" provides an adequate architecture for computation-as-mind (an even loftier loftier task than "just computation".. I think the answer is no, personally (if it were yes..it would be difficult to see why we needed computers, we ought to be able to pluck the computation out of the air..literally). Don't get me wrong, the requirements for computation are sometimes suprisingly low, but they do exist - and "being really big and having alot of stuff in it" doesn't actually get something any closer to meeting those requirements.
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