KipIngram

Indeed - if I'm totally wrong about this and AI can emerge from conventional computing, then we do need to be very, very careful. I for one don't want to create technology that then turns around and puts us down. The researchers in AI who are focused on this (how to ensure that we keep control of an AI that we create, even if it makes us look about as smart as bacteria), are definitely approaching it the right way. Goldglow, I may be wrong, but my reading of the Strong AI theorem is that it denies precisely what you just said. I think your first three sentences exactly captures Weak AI, but then the rest of your post proposes "more," and Strong AI says exactly that "there is no more."

In any experiment you set up on non-relativistic scales it will look that way - to a very close approximation they'll fall together. On the other hand, with a long rope like you've indicated (why not make it even longer, to make it more clear), they would not. The change in tension of the rope at the cut has to propagate to the other end, and that takes time. You just can't expect the intuitions you've developed living in the world of short distances and small speeds to apply to situations far, far outside your experience. Say you added two more pulleys, lower and right next to each other, and arranged for the masses to be immediately next to each other (the rope would make a triangle then). Make your rope a light year long instead of just 3000 km. Then when you cut off M1, it will fall immediately. But M2 wouldn't fall for a year or more. And of course this is neglecting all the practical problems, like rope sag and so on. The tension wave will propagate through the rope at a speed governed by the rope's mass per unit length and tension. But no matter what rope parameters you invoke, that speed can't exceed the speed of light, because the internal atomic construction of real rope won't allow that.

StringJunkie: Yes, before I even started I worried about that. But we got all the way to page 5... quickquestion: I feel awareness. I observe it, and seek to explain it. I haven't been able to do so via straight physics. So in that sense I'm speculating that perhaps awareness represents something not present in our theories. But that's all - it doesn't lead me to presume any "grand structure" to what that missing part might be. My experience gives me no reason to believe that my awareness and anyone else's are connected, just as it gives me no reason to believe there exists one particular "almighty" Awareness. I feel sure about my sensation of my own awareness. One way or another, I feel it. Maybe it's emergence - maybe it's its own fundamental thing. But even if it turns out to be fundamental, I have no basis on which to concoct a theology around it.

Ok. We can use whatever word you like, but if we then (in further discussion) start to talk about a formal definition for that word that doesn't include what I'm talking about, then I might change my mind about whether that word applies. It was just the best phrase I could come up with to capture the meaning. I don't see any more reason to believe that organic tissue (cells, etc.) would be any more able to "be aware" or "experience sensation" than silicon transistors. Basically my whole consternation over all of this is that NONE of the laws of physics, at the fundamental level, lead to anything more than a mechanism. The attribute of awareness, or whatever we're calling it, appears absent across the board. I've had that same thought myself (sampling entities). But I don't think we know enough about consciousness to know whether there is one or many. Surface layer observations seem to say "many," but without any notion of the internals of consciousness I don't think it's possible to be sure. I just looked up sentience and found this: "Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively." That seems fine - it more or less captures what I'm talking about. Provided that "feel," "perceive," and "experience" actually mean something other than "register" or "record," because computers can register and record just fine. But I don't think that makes them "aware" per se. So we may have just pushed the discussion down to the meaning of those words (feel, perceive, etc.)

MonDie: When I think of emergence in connection with computer applications, the first thing that pops to mind as an example is Conway's Game of Life. The whole thing is driven by those dead-simple little rules, and yet if you watch it go for a while you start to see interesting patterns and so forth. It would be really hard to predict those patterns from the rules themselves (other than by running examples and observing).

I'm not 100% sure about lunar, but interplanetary missions at least use Hohmann transfers. Imagine you're in a circular orbit around the central body. And you want to wind up in a different circular orbit. For lunar missions one of the orbits would be the moon's and the other a LEO; for planetary the two circular orbits would be those of the planet you're starting from and the planet you're going to. There's an elliptical orbit that has the inner of those two circular orbit radii as its perigee / perihelion, and the outer as its apogee / aphelion. So a Hohmann transfer involves a burn that transfers you from your starting circular orbit into that elliptical orbit, and when you reach the radius of the other circular orbit you do another burn. For transfers outward both burns would increase your orbital speed; for transfers inward both would reduce your orbital speed. This is the lowest cost way to get between the two circular orbits. Obviously you have to time this so that the target body will "be there" when you arrive. This is why deep space mission have "launch windows." I guess it's also worth noting that this is not the *fastest* way to get around. It's just the lowest energy cost way. As far as lunar missions go, this link has more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-lunar_injection As far as "slingshot" goes, for a Hohmann transfer you would always go in the same direction your target is orbiting; otherwise you'd have to reverse direction when you arrived instead of just "speed up / slow down." But the precise timing would just be based on arriving at a "meeting" with the target; all you're really doing is shifting from circle to ellipse or ellipse to circle. I'm not an expert, but I'm guessing slingshots are done with bodies you encounter in the middle of a journey, to adjust direction or increase or decrease orbital speed wrt the sun. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist A wisely chosen slingshot might save energy or time compared to a straight-up Hohmann from origin to destination. But I bet you'd still do a Hohmann from origin to the gravity assist body. I'm not familiar enough with it to know what tricks might come after that, though. Edit Turns out that in some cases there's a bi-elliptic transfer that requires less energy than a direct Hohmann transfer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-elliptic_transfer But those have really long time requirements.

Wait - that sounds like you're positing that the fields within the transistors, if you arrange them in ever so perfect the right way, create some new, higher level field. Am I reading that right? What would the nature of that field be? Does it involve one of the four known forces? When this field appears, would it react on the transistors such that they no longer observed the same equations of operation that they do now? I don't think that's the sort of "emergence" the emergence guys are talking about - I don't think they're invoking any new physics. Just patterns in the operation of the old physics. What you just described (unless I interpreted it wrong) sounds like something just as far outside of existing physics as "fundamental consciousness" would be.

koti: "My unscientific opinion is that the idea that consciousness is somehow involved is mumbo jumbo." As far as I've been able to tell from my reading the consciousness crowd's argument runs something like this: 1) In describing a quantum measurement, you need to draw a line between "the observed" and "the observer." Then you treat the internal evolution of "the observed" using Schrodinger's equation, and when "the observer" extracts a piece of information from "the observed" you say that collapse has occurred. 2) Someone (von Neumann?) showed that you can draw that line anywhere; you just wind up with a more-or-less complex system to evolve with Schrodinger's equation. But you always wind up with the same basic outcome (accounting for your different definitions of observed and observer, of course) when whatever's left outside finally observes and the wave function collapses. 3) Then someone pointed out that you could move everything physical inside the boundary. So now you have the entire universe evolving via Schrodinger's equation. So what's left to be the observer? All of the various interpretations of quantum theory come from one way or another of resolving this quandary. You can either 1) assume that there's something else called "consciousness" which is inherently non-physical and thus always outside the cut, no matter where you place it, or 2) propose that no such thing as collapse ever occurs and everything remains a quantum superposition forever (this is basically Many Worlds). Usually combined with #2 is the notion that decoherence with the environment produces effects that "look" like collapse, in order to explain why everyone in every part of the superposition would perceive something that looked like collapse. I also so a pretty good quantum information paper that gave a really good presentation of how by the time a quantum system has become entangled with a many-particle instrument and that has become further entangled with "the environment" you wind up with a "collapse looking" result. This one, I think: https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9605039v2.pdf But yeah, invoking consciousness is invoking something completely outside our theories of physics, and I guess that's as good a definition of "mumbo jumbo" as anything.

Actually it still needs fuel not just to escape the moon's gravity on the way back but also to achieve the delta-v necessary to have its orbit intersect the Earth's atmosphere. Once there, atmospheric friction will do the rest of the braking. But if you snapped your fingers and the moon vanished, the ship would still be in lunar orbit. It has to slow down in order to fall closer to the Earth. Atmospheric drag factors aside, it takes just as much delta-v to get from orbit to Earth as it does to get from Earth to orbit.

Yes, I have to agree with that. You're basically saying that we don't understand emergence well enough to satisfy my desire, and that may well be true. As I said, my mind is subject to change on this. I'm eager to study anything I can about emergence - what I'm seeking is rigor. I don't really know about termite mounds, but another example is snowflakes. I'm assuming that we could suss out something about the how the water molecules orient themselves with one another in solid form that would lead to the six-fold symmetry, and so on. The harder question is why are the six arms always the same. Maybe there are multiple ways the crystal can "start out," and then that leads to six-fold symmetry every time, but in different ways. But that isn't as mystifying to me as trying to get consciousness out of emergence. The structure of a snowflake is still just a structure, and we know that the crystal will have some structure. Awareness seems so far afield from what transistors (for example) do, that I can't see the bridge. Anyway, I'm pointedly trying to avoid making sure and certain claims here. I just observe my awareness, and it looks like their are two ways I can explain it: 1) it "just is" - i.e., it has to do with something new that appears nowhere in our current theories, or 2) it does somehow "just happen" when physical systems become sufficiently complex. It's easier, today, for me, to accept #1. But #1 comes at a cost - it's a full-on admission that we are missing at least one entire chunk of reality from our theories. It would certainly be more satisfying to be able to feel good about #2 (like I said, I like understanding things - it's why I keep pounding my brain against all these areas of science that do not and never will be important to my career). I'd love to avoid the cost of #1 and embrace #2, but my own personal standard of believability hasn't been met. #1 asks me to swallow more "on faith" than I'm able to. But I will keep poking at it. I did chase down my copy of GEB, but I haven't started reading it again yet. Work's been sort of hectic this week. Maybe over the weekend.

No, that doesn't help me much. My core issue here is that all of the transistors in the computer are still just transistors. Each one still just has a charge distribution in it, and still just has two potential differences (Vgs and Vds) as inputs. They just have no "global" interconnectivity to fuel some mysterious emergence. If you can't look at one transistor and recognize a vehicle for awareness, having 100, or 1000, or 10^10^10 doesn't help. On the other hand, we can see how algorithmic behavior emerges - we have excellent theoretical and engineering understanding of how to get arrays of transistors to do fancy, organized things. But in none of those cases does the computer "know" what it's doing - each transistor is still just doing its transistor thing. I don't mean to sound close-minded. I don't want to be close-minded. I'm just leaning toward what I consider to be the more believable explanation. As I said somewhere earlier, it's easier for me to accept that there may be aspects to the universe that we have no clue about than to accept that a system we purport to 100% understand the physics of can achieve something that that physics in no way predicts. On the other hand, I'm not just jumping for joy at the idea of invoking the unknown. If I could encounter a presentation of consciousness emergence that actually seemed to have any rigorous traction whatsoever (even a hint), I'd reconsider - I agree with the general notion of not introducing extraneous unproven things into the model when the model already provides a plausible explanation. I like understanding things - I get a bigger kick out of that than I can put into words. But I've never seen anyone explain the how of emergence. Every presentation of it I've ever seen pretty much just says "It just does emerge." No explanation - just the claim.

I'm not sure exactly what is up here, but I was just trying to share what I found to be a very readable book about a subject I've found it very hard to "crack into," so to speak. I can't tell from the above if it was my original post that was a possible rules violation, but if so I'm extremely sorry. I didn't have any intention of trying to advocate for or against string theory / string hypothesis or whatever - I just thought the material was presented in a very understandable way. I don't know nearly enough about it to be taking a position on it - I'm just trying to learn. Just to be totally clear (maybe I should have said this better in the original post), my reasoning for pointing out the book was not to promote string-related stuff. What I found praise-worthy was the manner of presentation (the step-by-step building up of the apparatus, such that even a complete novice in the subject like me was able to follow along).

Well, I think it would be great if we can have that. And I am not as up-to-date on the latest as you seem to be. My work storing serious energy (for electric launchers and so on) in capacitors was in graduate school, in the late 1980s. And my research group was primarily focused on rotating machinery energy storage (homopolar generators, and one we invented ourselves that we called the compulsator, for compensated pulsed alternator - it had higher output voltage than HPGs). So I should have mentioned earlier, just to complete the picture, that capacitors store energy in the dielectric by stretching the bonds (loosely speaking), and the limit (the dielectric strength) is more or less where the bond strength is exceed and the bonds break. So those really are very fundamental things. Any given material has what it has. So improvements will fall into the realm of material science. Graphene has a relationship to carbon nanotubes, and they're flipping strong, so it wouldn't surprise me too much to learn that similar payoffs can be had in arenas less directly mechanical. Of course, I mentioned diamond, and it's carbon-based as well. Carbon really does seem to be sort of the "super element" in a lot of ways.

Well, yeah - if we can all have our own Mr. Fusion then it's a whole new world. Sounds great. But I still think you're vastly overestimating the future capability of capacitors. It's not the case that the processes that occur in a capacitor as it's charged can "approach" those that occur in chemical energy storage. With real chemical energy storage you are working with real chemical reactions. You're actually changing the chemical composition of the materials. That brings the energy of covalent bonds to the table. With capacitor dielectric, you are merely "stretching" the chemical bonds, so to speak. It's a process of an entirely different nature. I think our earlier calculation was pretty sound, and that something on the order of 100 kJ/kg will prove to be the limit. A watt-hour is 3600 Joules, so the number you just threw out (400-500 Wh/kg) is equivalent to 1.6 MJ/kg.

For anyone who's interested, I stumbled across this during the weekend: https://cquest-studygroup.wikispaces.com/file/view/A+First+Course+in+String+Theory.pdf I'm finding it very clear, very informative, and very enjoyable. Maybe it just happens to be at just the right "level" for me, given my prior knowledge. I just thought there might be others out there it would be suitable for as well. So, hope it's helpful to some folks!

I did some electric vehicle work while I was working for UT Austin's Center for Electromechanics. There's so much to love about them. Most obviously, electric motors can reach efficiency levels well above internal combustion engines. But the energy storage problem is a bear. Lots of hurdles to get over there. For example, let's say you have your fantastic capacitor that can store the energy. Now you're on a road trip, in your regular internal combustion car, and you get low on gas. So you pull into the first station you come to, pop the pump nozzle into your tank, and squeeze the trigger. What's happening there? Well, my tank holds 15 gallons and it takes maybe two minutes to fill it, so let's say your pumping gasoline at 7.5 gallons per minute. Gasoline has about 132 MJ/gallon of energy content. So (7.5 gallons/minute) * (132*10^6 J/gallon) / (60 seconds/minute) = 16.5 megawatts. So to have that same experience in an electric car you have to have a cable from the charging unit to your car, and a connector where the connection is made, that can handle order of 10 megawatts. That's some serious power flow. Obviously if you're willing to wait longer you can bring that down, but meanwhile all the other customers are waiting in line, and so on. Let's say we're charging at 500V (which would raise serious safety issues) you're looking at over 40 kA of current flow. So it's not just a matter of making the car work - there's an entire infrastructure that has to be brought into existence. I have a feeling electric cars will find a place in our world, but tI think they'll be used primarily for "around town" runs that allow the car to be charged overnight in the garage for the next day's running about. That automatically limits them to people who can afford multiple vehicles, since most people will still want to have their "out of town" capable car. I will say that I think you're looking at the right part of the problem - the batteries are the weak link in the current generation of electric vehicles. I owned a Honda Civic hybrid a while back, and the batteries just didn't last. I was bitterly disappointed - I'd been excited about the whole idea. But when it came time to buy another car I went back to internal combustion.

Oh, that wasn't directed at you at all, EdEarl - your comments were fantastic. Honestly I am entirely open-minded to emergence. Before I can go there, though, I just need some more substance to the claim, that's all. Maybe the GEB perspective is sound - I've read the book, but it was long ago. I need to re-read it with this particular line of thought in mind. This looks very interesting. I'm not quite willing to pay $40 to read it, though, so I'll note it down and keep looking. http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/S0306-9877(04)00255-5/abstract

EdEarl: I understand. I think this is a somewhat fuzzy area. I think it's fair to say that there's no PROOF there's not something "conscious" behind uncertainty, but on the other hand I also see that that flies in the face of Occam's Razor if you're looking purely at explaining experimental results. I just feel like my self awareness is something that bears explaining, and I'm not comfortable (yet) with the soundness of the emergence explanation. Someone else might feel like it doesn't need explaining, or may be completely comfortable with emergence. Hence discussions like this. I do want to emphasize, though that while I find the free will discussion very interesting, I do regard self-awareness as a more fundamental puzzle. You have to have awareness before you can have free will (since free will is choices made by the awareness), and I already saw at least one way you could invoke awareness and awareness-perceived free will without actually having that free will affect the material world (I outlined it yesterday - the many worlds interpretation with awareness able to choose the multiverse path). I regard my self-awareness as an experimental result. It doesn't really pass the "community test," since I can't prove it in any way, but it passes my own personal test as something that is real. frankglennjacobs: I don't even know how to respond to that. I think several people in this discussion disagree with me, but we're still managing to have at least a marginally scientific discussion. Hoffman proposes that space is just something we perceive when we process information exchanged with other conscious agents. Whether one agrees with his theories or not, he's got at least some mathematical rigor behind them, so yes, it is possible to consider the non-existence of space. Time is a little more delicate - his conscious agents have internal "counters" that tick off the number of information exchange operations. Perceived times isn't that exactly (i.e., time wouldn't have to flow proportionally to those counters"), but it's certainly at least related. So it might be fair to say that "something like time" is fundamental in his theory. I think that it's fair to say that I'm basically proposing that we have something like spirits or souls - whatever you want to call the "consciousness on the other side of uncertainty." We could call them conscious agents too. But even if call those things souls, I see absolutely no strong implication that there's a "super entity" we'd call God. I mean, there could be - I don't think it can be disproven. But nothing gives a strong reason to start invoking an entity of that caliber in this discussion. I'd very much prefer to keep this conversation out of those areas. I observe my own self-awareness, and I can't see how to explain it within the confines of physical theory. So I can take the step to "something else" producing it, until I feel there's a better explanation. But that's as far as I see any reason to go. One of my biggest concerns in bringing this topic up to begin with was that people would presume I was trying to sneak God in the back door. So I tried to be very careful about how I presented my thoughts. I think there may be more to us than our material bodies. But I don't go to church, don't believe that any existing organized religion has any serious credence, and don't feel that a God or gods is required to explain anything I see happening in the world, including my own self-awareness. So please let's keep the conversation completely clear of religion, if you don't mind.

I didn't mean to be dropping it. I'm happy to discuss it further. But I do agree with EdEarl's comment that if you want to work with the Many World's interpretation then free will becomes sort of a non-issue; everything happens, so nothing unique happens, so there's nothing for the free will to "do." It's one of the reasons MWI has never really appealed to me very much, whereas the Copenhagen Interpretation's assertion that no real result appears until observation is more up my alley. Said another way, CI proposes that there is a collapse, without really explaining what it is (at least not in the same rigorous way that it explains the deterministic evolution of the unobserved state via the Schrodinger equation. I've always felt that Many Worlds popped up in the first place via a line of thought a la "Hey, this 'collapse' thing has no rigorous explanation, so let's just get rid of it. What then?" I was in sort of a hurry the last time and only noticed EdEarl's response; I'm going to go back and study yours now and try to give you a better reply. Eise: "QM predicts probabilities. EPR experiments show that underneath the determined probability distribution do not lie local causes. And that is exactly what you seem to suggest: that QM-events allow room for the will to interfere with nature." So I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb here - I'm not really well-heeled in this stuff yet. But I'll give it a go. The EPR related experiments deal with correlations re: ensembles of systems. These are artificial systems constructed in labs, so I think it's safe to say that no consciousness is connected to those quantum events. Even if you grant me my premise (that free will acts via quantum uncertainty), we still have to discuss what happens in systems un-connected to any consciousness. I think any one event would then have to be random - we make an observation and so a result is required, but no consciousness has any ability to choose results in that system. So random, and the Bell's Theorem correlations follow. By definition each action of a consciousness would occur only once - there'd be no way to create ensembles of identical events. Eise: "Well, we might get in a discussion about terms" Yes, I think that there's a lot of energy we could pour into that and not get very far. But let me kick around your definition a little. So "free will means not coerced." To define what is coerced and what is not, you have to draw a boundary, and "coercion" would be physical causes from outside that boundary. I think if we draw the boundary just outside my skin, we'd have the situation you're referring to - as long as nothing outside of me was the primal cause of an action, I wasn't coerced and thus had free will. But that definition doesn't fully capture what I'm talking about. Even if no "out of boundary" force causes me to act a certain way, if my action is pre-determined by my own internal state then I'm not really choosing that action. It was just inertia. Maybe a rough analogy would be if I'm driving fast down the highway and crest a small rise to discover there's a brick wall just beyond it. I really don't want to run into that wall, but I might have no choice. And nothing pushed me into the wall; it was my own internal inertia that made me unable to avoid it. No one should say that I chose to run into the wall - rather they should say that I chose to drive too fast over a blind hill. Eise: "If my choice were completely uninfluenced, then my actions would have nothing to do with the circumstances I am in, and also with who I am: my character, the things I learned in my life, my self-knowledge. That kind of free will is a chimera." The situation isn't black and white. I absolutely agree we are influenced by our experiences, memories, and so on. All of those things are a very important part of who we are. I just don't think that those things are the totality of what determines our actions. I think we are capable of "surprising the universe." Capable of injecting an "additional input" to the action determination. I think it's important to note that awareness goes hand in hand with the type of free will I am claiming. If nothing in us is "aware," then I don't see how it's possible to go beyond the automaton behavior that would have free will limited to your version. It did occur to me yesterday that combining the presumed existence of self-awareness as a fundamental thing with the Many Worlds interpretation leads to a rather clean model. "Free will" as a physically effective thing goes away. Like I said earlier, there's nothing for it to do. The physical universe unfolds via MWI, and awareness would just choose which path to ride along with. With that perspective, neither awareness nor free will would have any effect on the physical world whatsoever. And yet awareness would feel that it was exercising free will. I didn't particularly like where that thought process led - in it's cleanest form you wound up with a multiverse populated with every existing awareness, but the chances of any two of them being in the same branch would rapidly become nil. Each awareness would have it's own private universe within the multiverse. But it did strike me as the most non-invasive way to add "presumed awareness" onto a physical model. Eise: "Now you are suggesting that there must be something (mind, soul), that sits in the control room, using the controls, getting information via the senses, but not subject of causality. But now you have only moved the problem to some subentity." Yes, you're right. My leanings do precisely invoke a subentity; the reason being that I haven't figured out how to consider the original entity (a purely material body) capable of generating awareness. I feel that emergence theories do more or less the same thing - they posit awareness as an emergent property, but without offering any real explanation of how that happens. I'm posting a subentity, without offering any real explanation of how it exists. I am attempting to explain how the subentity and the physical entity could be connected, but not what the subentity is. So I guess to some extent it's just two flavors of the same maneuver. Eise: "No. Determinism and fatalism are two very different things..." Ok, I'll try to address that by working backward in time. Start at birth. All of the things you mention shortly after the quote (beliefs, feelings, etc.) are just accumulated effects of external stimuli experienced starting at birth, in your model. So the adults "choice" still isn't really a choice. Unless you invoke, at some point in the process, an independent external input from something outside the physical. Somewhere in the process there has to be an opportunity for a real, fully independent choice, for me to feel justified in making moral judgment. Eise: "No! Exactly the opposite..." Well, I totally agree with you. I also accept that others are aware. And yet I still cannot see any way to ascribe awareness to an array of transistor voltages, neuron chemical states, and so on. If I built a robot out of conventional computer parts, no matter how much it seemed to behave as if it were aware, I just wouldn't have the same belief that it was aware that I have of other human beings. And that really brings us full circle back to my original post - I feel that "emergent awareness" is a claim that has been given absolutely no validation. Imagine a whole in the the ceiling - a ceiling that you have no ability whatsoever to see beyond. If an object is hanging on a string that's coming through that hole, and is moving up and down, it's easy to conclude that "something is up there pulling that string." We see the object experiencing a force, and we see a mechanism for that force to connect to something above the ceiling, but we have zero information on what that something is. That's how I see the "consciousness is fundamental" argument. The fundamental consciousness is the thing above the ceiling, and quantum uncertainty is "the string." I can accept that I don't know everything much more readily than I can accept an array of physical states magically acquiring awareness. Said another way, it's easier for me to assume an unexplained effect arises from an unknown entity, rather than try to shoehorn it into known entities with no theoretical basis whatsoever. Whew. Sorry to be so long-winded, but you provided a lot of food for thought. Hope your weekend is going well! Quick extra thought. I see similarities between this and the step to quantum physics back around the beginning of the 20th century. Take black body radiation as an example. We had these great theories that we thought were complete, or at least very close to complete. Then here comes black body radiation and it just doesn't fit. So of course we wound up with quantum theory. I feel like "emergent consciousness" is the same sort of thing. It just doesn't fit in our existing theories of physics. Absolutely no indication at all of how it should suddenly pop up. Maybe someone will come up with something new that brings it into the fold. That's the sort of thing that would make me instantly accept the idea. Even a promising glimmer of such an idea would really affect my opinion of the whole matter. That's sort of what I was fishing for when I made the original post - some aspect of emergent phenomena theory that I hadn't discovered yet that I could go read up on. The closest anyone has come so far was over in that other thread when they mentioned GEB. That really did make me think. It's not fully satisfactory to me, because it seems it could be used as an argument for almost anything, but on the other hand I can't really claim that "consciousness is fundamental" is really any better - both ideas require that you accept something without any hope of a proof.

Yes, very true. The free will discussion has been a bit of a digression, though - my original post was more about perception of self-awareness. Even if many worlds is correct, there's still no explanation for how any of those myriad entities would experience awareness (or "experience" anything, for that matter).

Ok, so sure - let's play with that. C = eA/L, where e is permittivity, A is area, and L is plate separation. We'll consider only dielectric mass (ignore the plates). If d is density, then mass is d*A*L. Energy is C*V^2/2, so energy density (D) is: D = (C*V^2/2) / (d*A*l) = (e*A*V^2) / (2*d*A*L^2) = (e*V^2) / (2*d*L^2) = (e/2*d) * (V/L)^2. We could plug numbers at this point, but you're going to wind up with the energy density going as 1/L^2; the thinner you make your dielectric layer the higher your energy density will be. What I'm inclined to do at this point is define V/L as b, the dielectric strength of the material. Then your limiting energy density is D = (e*b^2) / (2*d) and you have everything in terms of material properties. If you look at the Wikipedia article on dielectric strength, you see that "vacuum" has a value of 10^12, but that seems to be "perfect vacuum" - higher up in the table is an entry for "high vacuum (field emission limited)" and the value there is only 20-40 MV/m. Otherwise diamond is far and away the highest value in the list, at 2000 MV/m. The article on permittivity gives diamond a relative permittivity of 5.5-10, so let's say 10 since we're optimists. Density of diamond is 3.5 g/cm^3 or 3500 kg/m^3. Plugging and chugging, D = (10*8.854*10^-12) * (2*10^9)^2 / (2*3500) Units: (C^2 N^-1 m^-2) * (V^2 m^-2) / (kg m^-3) The fastest way to simplify the units is to note that a volt has units N*m/C; then those units at the right fall right down to J/kg. D = 50.6 kJ/kg. You can play with other materials, but on a quick peek it looked to me like diamond's b=2000 probably outweighed any shortcomings it had in its other parameters. Note that its density is right in the range you suggested. Now compare that to gasoline, which has D = 46.4 MJ/kg (order of 1000 times the diamond capacitor). You see pretty quickly why chemical energy storage carries the day.

That would require assuming a density as well, wouldn't it? And a voltage of course.

Yes, I think it's a terribly difficult issue to discuss because of the point you made: the key observation that I make that leads me to believe consciousness involves more than mechanism is my own self awareness. I can't observe yours - you can't observe mine. Each of us can directly observe on one self-awareness: our own. Sharing those observations is impossible, and the whole thing is more or less rendered "unscientific" right then and there. I absolutely cannot deny the theoretical (and perhaps practical, someday) possibility of a system constructed using the equivalent of today's computer technology (except much more complex) that can 100% pass the Turing test and give a flawless imitation of consciousness. It would be able to communicate in-depth about its "feelings," express its belief that it was self-aware, and so on. But understanding the underlying physics of that system (Maxwell's equations, etc.) as I do, I'd still not be able to believe that it "feels its self awareness" in the manner that I do. And that same argument of course applies to a brain, viewed exclusively in terms of Maxwell's equations, chemistry, and so on, if the proposed model was classical in all of its significant particulars. I've actually regretted bringing this up over the last few days, because this is more or less where every conversation seems to end up: if you can't demonstrate your own self-awareness to others, then you're not self aware. But I think I'll choose not to regret it, though, because some people have shared some very interesting links and so forth with me. Thanks very much for the reply, and it's nice to meet you!

"Infinite" is an absolute. "Very high" permittivity is great; you will get a non-zero voltage and thus can deliver and extract power. But your word was "infinite."

Well, yes, but those memories were formed based on experiences driven by physical events. I don't really see that that changes the "validity of judgment" thing. I recognize that you still could objectively categorize people as "good" and "bad" simply because of the physical events they triggered, but if they have no "real" choice, at the moment of committing an action, then it's hard for me to really make a moral judgment about them re: that action. It seems like the proper mental attitude to have toward them would be similar to the one we have toward, say, the weather.