this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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AskBeehaw
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there are infinite ways to arrange and configure finite neurons
are mental processes entirely computable though? you kind of run into a halting-problem-style issue because if you can compute your response to anything that should imply that you can never make a decision that surprises the computation. but if you feed knowledge of the computation's result into your decision making process you can just pick the opposite
hm? i don't see how this is true at all. a finite of anything in a finite space can only have finite configurations.
The universe might be discrete.
If mental states are finite, then the space of all possible human minds is finite and includes the one that believes they have knowledge of the computation's result. It is possible for mental states of 2 minds to be different but extensionally behave like the same person. We would exclude human minds whose models don't map well onto the physics of our universe though. You might not be willing to pick the opposite if we are talking about morality also @askbeehaw
It's possible that brains act stochastically such that two discrete identical brains produce a range of outputs under identical conditions. In that case, mental states would be confined by the space of outputs of minds, and if that's the real numbers then it would be uncountably many.