Re: Internet as Mind

> What restrains this this thing called "mind" to quantum
> phenomenon?
>
> If it walks and talks and ...etc ... like a duck,
> why shouldnt we just call it a duck regardless of its
> parentage ?

Because that will only prove imitation of mind. Granted, we cannot
externally prove subjective experience, but we can prove the absence of an
explanatory gap. If the Internet walks and talks, and we can fully explain
its walking and talking, then there is nothing left to provide subjectivism.
We can (in theory) freeze the Internet, copy it, restart it, etc. without
adversely affecting its walking and talking. A Mandelbrot set is infinitely
complex, but that infinity is fully described by a small procedure and
however much time one wishes to use exploring the set. It never becomes
anything greater. It's just data, and the whole Internet can  ultimately be
reduced to just data as well. An observer is more than his description. He
would have to be, otherwise how could he be an observer? How can mere data
observe itself?

This is an old debate, of course, and I have no wish to fan the flames
without some improved argument. All I can currently offer is that, despite
our best efforts, our software only performs various aspects of mind, but
there is no hint of subjectivism. The main distinction between brain and
computer has become this quantum issue. We can build the neural networks,
yes. We can build good sensors. We make fine memory chips. We can even make
circuits run asynchronously and in parallel. But the brain still does one
thing differently: it can (or there is good reason to believe it can) access
the quantum level.

I don't want to appeal to a mysterious ether any more than the next person.
But there are two things: 1) the evidence against quantum interfacing
remains uncertain and 2) for me, the idea has an intuitive elegance I can't
easily dismiss. The universe as a whole is logically metaphysical and
singular, therefore everything is composed of this unreal monic. The human
brain has the particularly complex and requisite structure to let the
underlying metaphysicalness be realized and participate in what we call
physical reality.

Or to put it another way: the underlying monic is vibrating furiously in a
highly complex pattern, but some subpatterns have the quality of letting the
monic perceive itself on a complex scale. However, since these subpatterns
require a supporting set of infrastructrual subpatterns, and the nature of
the perception is mediated by a particular set of others, the result comes
out looking like physical reality to us. The true nature of things,
unfortunately, is not immediately evident to observers because of the way
observation must be mediated in order to work at all.

Ray