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Kindle Notes & Highlights
pleasure and pain, the appreciation of beauty and humour, consciousness, and free will are capacities that will emerge naturally when electronic robots become sufficiently complex in their algorithmic behaviour.
Objections have been raised in past centuries to the reductionist claim that a mind is a machine operated by known laws of physics,
Mandelbrot set
complex numbers, Turing machines, complexity theory, the bewildering paradoxes of quantum mechanics, formal systems, Gödel undecidability, phase spaces,
Hilbert spaces, black holes, white holes, Hawking radiation, entropy, the structure of the brain,
In his fourfold classification of theories as superb, useful, tentative, and misguided,
black hole where the laws of physics no longer apply.
new kind of matter.
quasicrystals
our mathematical understanding contains elements that lie beyond purely computational action.
Goodstein’s theorem.
Goodstein’s remarkable theorem tells us that no matter what positive whole number we start with (here 581) we always eventually end up with zero!
‘non-computational action’
Non-computable processes can be completely deterministic.
required non-computability will be found.
‘quantum gravity’.
What does it mean to think or to feel? What is a mind? Do minds really exist? Assuming that they do, to what extent are minds functionally dependent upon the physical structures with which they are associated? Might minds be able to exist quite independently of such structures? Or are they simply the functionings of (appropriate kinds of) physical structure?
we do not understand the nature of space at the absurdly tiny scale of 1/100000000000000000000 of the dimension of the known fundamental particles,
black holes and big bang are considerations which actually do have a definite bearing on these issues!
