Date: August 18th, 2026 2:41 AM Author: Sienna comical field milk
How well does this one work with empirical evidence? I suppose with something like brain damage you can say "Sure, damage the receiver, and the signal comes through incorrectly." and that rescues it from being strictly logically disproved. I think pharmacology examples make it much harder to sustain with this type of response though. Are the biochemical processes that change from the drugs just changing how the receiver receives consciousness? Seems kind of silly to say that if the resulting experience is already being systematically controlled by mechanisms inside the nervous system.
Date: August 18th, 2026 1:52 AM Author: anal medicated quadroon corner
the mind is not a digital object that can be uploaded. Fredkin's digital physics is the most discredited thing of all time, even Stephen Wolfram abandoned it.
Date: August 18th, 2026 2:15 AM Author: Sienna comical field milk
No. Uploading requires substrate independence of mind, not digital ontology of the universe. A continuous/non-digital physical system can still instantiate dynamics that are computationally emulable.
Date: August 18th, 2026 2:33 AM Author: Sienna comical field milk
Substrate independence isn't something that applies only to software. It’s about whether a pattern of causal organization can be realized in more than one physical medium. I don't think the mind is software. The mind is a physical process instantiated by the brain. Nevertheless, another physical system could instantiate sufficiently similar causal dynamics to realize the same or an equivalent mental process. I don't think a fully faithful human upload is coming by the 2040s, I think it is plausible something that get's called uploading will be here by then, but not full emulation. I was making fun of the idea that it will definitely be here by then. But I don't think the overall idea of uploading is impossible in principle. We'll see though.
Date: August 18th, 2026 2:51 AM Author: anal medicated quadroon corner
"Nevertheless, another physical system could instantiate sufficiently similar causal dynamics to realize the same or an equivalent mental process."
if it could, it would have nothing to do with digital systems. furthermore, you wouldn't be able to actually copy an existing mind to such a platform but only "induce" a roughly-comparable one.
digital systems are all yin and no yang, that's why they can't hold a mind.
Date: August 18th, 2026 3:03 AM Author: Sienna comical field milk
Mind is a physical dynamical process. If the causal features constitutive of that process can be instantiated by another physical system, then that system can instantiate a mind. Whether digital hardware is capable of doing so is a separate question. Digital computation is an abstraction implemented by physical processes, so the digitalness of the computation doesn't rule it out on its own.