That's where we are all going dude. To a place with no empiricial evidence.
Sorry, you're not going anywhere dude.... your dude-molecules are just going to deteriorate and form new compounds and substances. There's plenty of empirical evidence for that :(
And it only takes one of us to believe it. And I do
Once again.. Sorry, but Belief != Truth
It doesn't matter if you or I, Connor, Petia or even God himself believes something, it doesn't imply truth at all.
Let's say I never did.
Yeah ... dude ... I checked, I never did.
You did:
No empirical evidence. Only "brain in a vat" thought experiments.
...
This is obvious. To look at it scientifically, I see only correlation, not causality. Until we can truly use deterministic molecular modeling of the brain so that we can predict a given response in consciousness to a given physical stimulus to the brain (and not vice versa) it seems impossible to prove causality.
There is a fine line between observing causation and correlation... I would definitely consider what we have observed so far as causative as it gets. I see how mixing these can cause trouble, but I see no reason why we should even doubt the information we have. Introducing a new element to the problem (consciousness as a separate, non-material process) is merely a digression into a highly speculative non-falsifiable realm. I don't understand why one would choose to blame consciousness on something they know they can't understand yet and drop it, rather than trying to take it apart as it appears.
And I agree, it is hard for a tool or a system to study itself. That is for sure!
I guess I'm a bit picky about the use of mathematical terminology in scientific/mathematical discussions. Information theoretic entropy has to do with random variables/distributions. A fixed structure (say a fixed binary string) has zero entropy since it is fixed and known. There is a notion of algorithmic information which might be closer to what you're getting at, but this (if I recall correctly) is only well-defined in an asymptotic sense (i.e. string length to infinity); the reason for this is that one can always create a customized Turing machine for which there exists extremely short programs which can reproduce some given finite set of finite length strings.
You're absolutely right Connor! I stand corrected. I was approaching the definition from a physical standpoint, not a mathematical one. So it would in this case be more accurate for me to say perhaps Kolmogorov complexity.
Since you bring up the topic of Turing machines, I have a question, and I am interested in your opinion on it....
Given the following Turing machine:
1. 0bbL0 - Skips through all blanks
2. 001N1 - Flips all 0's to 1's (simulating a form of memory/action)
3. 010N1 - Flips all 1's to 0's (simulating a form of memory/action)
4. 110L0 - Reverses what it has done in the last step
5. 101L0 - Reverses what it has done in the last step
Lines 2/3 act as a simple agent acting in a world
Lines 4/5 act upon or introspect on previous actions by the super-simplstic agent
Thus, through the fact that lines 4/5 make decisions based on another part of the system, they are technically aware of another non-static state in the machine, so this machine at least has a basic property of self-awareness.
So, do you think I would be making a mistake by inferring that the machine has at least some basic form of consciousness?
I ask you, because you seem to at least know the direction from which I am attacking the problem...