hal@finney.org wrote:
[snip]
> AIs can get into these funny kind
> of Schrodinger Cat superpositions where they believe two contradictory
> things at once, but people can't, and this could be used to claim that
> consciousness means something different for AIs.
>
> Hal
I talk with people who believe tow or more contradictory things at once fairly often. A lot of religions (or rather, religious people) are like this. "I believe Lord, Help thou my disbelief" and so forth. C.f. Orwell: doublethink.
Granted, an internally inconsistent worldview probably isn't the same thing as a quantum superposition of opinions, but who's to say. On evidence, Penrose notwithstanding, human consciousness doesn't seem to need quantum effects [Someone here I think pointed out that if this were the case, MRI scanners would be very very dangerous]. I agree that "consciousness" built around said quantum effects would be a fairly bizarre thing.
There's another item for that "Transhuman Purity Test" somebody made. Right after "Have you ever carked yourself into a planetary economy", "Have you ever carked yourself into a quantum computer - How many of you came out?" :)
Darin Sunley
rsunley@escape.ca