Re: Qualia and the Galactic Loony Bin

Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Sat, 19 Jun 1999 14:37:14 +0000

At 06:56 PM 18/06/99 -0700, Hal wrote:

>Either all possible mental states are existing all the time
>just due to random neural firings in disconnected brains all over the
>world, or else these carefully planned stimulations, which were designed
>to mimic actual neural patterns in a conscious brain, were not actually
>producing any mental states.
>
>So, what do you think?

Obviously the latter, since connectivity of the neurons is absent.

Which raises the interesting (pseudo?)point - Michael Nielsen can adjudicate, perhaps - that if all or most particles inside our light cone still retain a non-local connection from their propinquity at the Big Bang, does that suffice to instantiate all these Moravecian superposed mental states? Presumably not, since decoherence has long since extinguished most of the non-local connections.

Sorry for the typo in the title cite in my previous post. Hasty typing.

Damien Broderick