Take Wolfram's 1-dimensional cellular automata... some of them have infinite complexity, and of course you can "run" them for infinite time, and the "current" state is constantly expanding (like the Universe). So let's define "something feasible" as some specific finite bit pattern on the 1-dimensional line of an arbitrary current state. Is that "feasible" bit pattern guaranteed to appear anywhere in the automaton's present or future? I believe, and if I understand correctly, so does Wolfram, that for any reasonably complex "feasible pattern" the answer is no; even though the automaton produces infinitely many states, it is not guaranteed to explore all conceivable states.
In other words, in a given Universe (which has a specific set of rules that govern its evolution in time) even though there are infinitely many possible states, not all conceivable states are a possible result of that evolution.
TLDR: All energy usage produces waste heat, and while right now the planetary heating from altering the atmospheric composition (GHG emissions) dwarves that from waste heat, even if we were to switch all our energy production to "green" energy tomorrow, assuming continued exponential increase in energy consumption as at present, in one century waste heat alone would account for about 1K of planetary heating. Any technological civilization that follows a similar trajectory of exponential increase in energy consumption would make its planet uninhabitable within 1000 years.
This is not correct. Most plants get their N from nitrates or ammonia salts, and only some plants (mostly leguminous ones) use a direct symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria to produce these from atmospheric N2. Most of the N in natural ecosystems comes from decay of proteins (from vegetable or animal origin), and in agriculture of course it is added as fertilizer.
I've been on the same trip as this guy for the last couple of decades. I haven't tried to write it up as scientific papers, but I've been actively looking for refutation of some of the key insights that lead down this path of thinking and haven't found any yet.
I think that the key premise here is assuming that consciousness can be a feature of a turing machine. If you accept that premise then all objections to reality being purely mathematical fall away, and Conway's Game of Life (GoL) provides a perfect substrate for thought experiments around this. Because we know that GoL is turing complete, and GoL is obviously purely mathematical... its phenomena exist without our simulating them, simply because they are mathematically possible. We simulate them in order to help us discover their existence, but their existence is "Platonic", independent of our simulations. So if consciousness can be a feature of any turing complete system, then an infinitude of consciousnesses exist in the space of GoL phenomena; consciousnesses from whose perspective their respective (from our perspective purely mathematical) GoL Universes are "material".
The main obstacle to accepting this view is insisting on dualism between the material and the purely mathematical, giving a special status to materialism. But materialism also tends to lead one to accept that consciousness can be a property of turing machines, which would then imply a mathematical reality. I call this paradox "the poverty of materialism", and I'd love to see a convincing refutation.
If consciousness is a property of mathematical systems, and such an infinitude exists, what is the paradox? It sounds quite consistent to me. Could you elaborate?
The paradox only exists if you start with philosophical materialism, i.e. the assumption that reality is material in nature and mathematics is just something we use to describe the material reality. If you're not a materialist than there's no paradox, and you probably accept Texmark's view of the mulitverse or something like it.
I’m still not very sure of where the paradox is supposed to be for the materialist. Is the paradox supposed to be something like that the materialist accepts that consciousness is material, and that mathematical structures are not material?
Yes... the materialist says that consciousness is a manifestation of the material brain. But if the brain is a kind of computer the best formalism for it we have so far is the turing machine, which we know from cellular automata to be able to exist in a purely mathematical space, so materialism can't be correct.
The only way out from this paradox that can preserve materialism is to say that consciousness requires some feature of material reality that goes beyond turing completeness, perhaps quantum phenomena. shrug. Maybe so, but so far there is no evidence, and in the meantime AI is getting closer and closer to something like consciousness on plain old turing machine computers, no quantum computers required.
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I don't think it's really the case that "much of this discussion assumes" certain behaviors as being indicative of consciousness. Rather, it has been the case until recently that behaviorists pointed to various behaviors as being unique to humans, and jumped to the conclusion that this indicates that humans are conscious and other animals aren't. What has been happening recently is that one by one these behaviors have been show as not being truly unique to humans. It is becoming more and more undeniable that even when humans are fairly unique in the quantity of some of these characteristics, none of them are completely absent in all other animals, and many can be found to some degree even in very simple animals.
Less advanced in symbolic thinking and communicating. There are other forms of thinking (like fast tactical thinking, some predators are conceivably better at this than most humans) and communicating (emotional communication; if we could quantify that I would bet on elephants).
Orcas are better at communicating than humans are, their languages more directly resembles telepathy than the “encode thoughts into grunts that then need to be decoded” that we have. They are essentially beaming waveform pictures to each other
I agree but would word that as "...more conscious than mostother animals."
Humans are animals, and we don't have an agreed upon definition of consciousness that would allow us to quantify it so precisely that we can be sure of the way you worded it. Many of the smarter animals may have just as much (but somewhat different) consciousness as humans, and you we can definitely come up with a reasonable definition of consciousness under which some animals may have more of it. For example, if one of the major measurable dimensions of consciousness involves spacial awareness (and it might, as it helps delimiting self from other) then cetaceans could easily have more of it.
Some animals have better senses than humans (as you pointed out) but that doesn't make them more conscious than us. Maybe 2 aspects to measure degree of consciousness is intelligence and metacognition.
The reason to build a Dyson Sphere (or Swarm) is that you want all (or at least a large fraction) of the energy output of a star. To "build decentralized fusion reactors" that can provide the same scale of energy is even less practical than building a shell around a star and would require far more materials! Also, fusion is really simple when the ignition energy is provided for free by the gravitational compression of something the size of a star, and not so simple when you're trying to get it started on a small scale using any other form of energy for ignition. The bottom line is we don't really know if small-scale, controlled, net-energy-positive fusion is possible at all, but if it is it has a lot of overhead costs... you then have to deal with ignition energy, containment, etc. You're trying to make a mini-star and keep it tame. The physics are not favorable to this, they are favorable to star-sized stars, where gravity and fusion energy pressure can balance each other for millions of years.
The concentrated energy of Dyson Sphere can be very useful. Feed some of it into lasers and then launch starships and then slow them down when they get to destination. Not tiny probes with fusion reactors but full size starships.
Feed most of the energy of star to lasers and end up with weapon that will melt planets across the galaxy.
Honestly, don't need to expand across the galaxy if have Dyson Sphere, which could be explanation of Fermi Paradox.
Diffraction limit determines the fundamental beam divergence angle theta = lamda/pi/D, where D is the beam diameter, lamda is wavelegth of elwctromagnetic radiation (eg. light).
To minimize theta, we need to either increase D or decrease lamda.
Lets assume we would be able to make far infrared high power lasers, at say 10,000 nm = 1e-5 m wavelength.
Lets assume we would be able to make D, the diameter of our laser beam, similar to the diameter of a typical planet, for Earth it is ~13,000 km = 13e6 m.
Theta = 1e-5 / 3.14 / 13e6 ~= 1e-13 radians.
Sun is ~ 25,000 light years from the center of our galaxy, ~= 25e3 y 3e8 m/s 31.5e6 s/year ~= 1e20 m.
Laser beam diameter, there far away, would be: 1e-13 *1e20 = 1e7 m, similar to the diameter of Earth, not much further diverged, focused and delivering the wast amount of energy all over the planet thereby evaporating it to a gas.
Indeed, what you say about the melting far away planets is possible, in theory.
Take Wolfram's 1-dimensional cellular automata... some of them have infinite complexity, and of course you can "run" them for infinite time, and the "current" state is constantly expanding (like the Universe). So let's define "something feasible" as some specific finite bit pattern on the 1-dimensional line of an arbitrary current state. Is that "feasible" bit pattern guaranteed to appear anywhere in the automaton's present or future? I believe, and if I understand correctly, so does Wolfram, that for any reasonably complex "feasible pattern" the answer is no; even though the automaton produces infinitely many states, it is not guaranteed to explore all conceivable states.
In other words, in a given Universe (which has a specific set of rules that govern its evolution in time) even though there are infinitely many possible states, not all conceivable states are a possible result of that evolution.
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