Digital Minds and their perception

Question

My question is, “Would a digital mind, subject to a digital universe, perceptually be any different in its experience than an analogue mind to an analogue world in its experience?”

I guess what I mean, because of the nature in each situation, there would be no experience in loss of information over a period of time; in the analogue world the stream is continuous and suffers no loss, and in the digital scenario the information from the world is discrete; the mind is also discrete, so perceptually there also would be no loss. So its experience and its perception would, I presume, not differ.

My only doubt in this, though, would be the nature of time each world is subject to, since it’s direct and continuous in each scenario; the mechanism the digital mind is subject to would have a latency in each clink of the mechanism relative to continuous time.

Could anyone shed any light on this or am I way out of left field?

Answer 1

A digital mind is not lossless. A digital mind may lose information. Indeed, if it has any sort of storage limits, like a harddrive or a tape, it must lose information or simply run out space with which to store the result of perceptions!

The way a digital mind loses content is different. Analog signals degrade continuously over time. Digital information is lost when you destroy information. It's what happens when you take a bit which contains information because it can be a 1 or a 0, and set it to be 0 (which contains no information, because it can only be in one state). Just like deleting files on your hard drive, the information is lost.

Now what may help for understanding the gap between the models known as the digital mind and the analog mind is to throw away your assumptions about time. Phrasings in your question like "... loss of information over a period of time..." and "... would have a latency in each clink of the mechanism relative to continuous time" imply that you are thinking about digial minds using an analog concept of time. To use an analog concept of time and have the digital mind be aware of it (or able to measure it) requires a mixed analog/digital mind, which is a more complicated set of topics to explore.

Answer 2

I can see two angles on this. Buddhist thought sees consciousness as arising from the 'sense gates'. And those who believe in a universal grammar, must see language and thought as linked to our bodily being and what arises from it. We expect one day to be able to communicate with dolphins, but it will require some kind of bridging experiences, a physical rosetta stone of shared comprehension.

But on the other hand, consider the universality of the universal Turing machine, able to run any program. Or that Godel's incompleteness, essentially new creative 'undecidable' propositions can be made in any minimally complex system of signs. Whether these are appropriate for drawing conclusions about our analogue 'wetware' is not indisputable.

I draw from these perspectives, that digital minds, or artificial sentiences, would have a distinct character based on their senses and the emergence of the minds experiences in them, but have a universal capacity as thinking beings to be able to engage with us.

I don't really share your highlighting of information keeping, or time. People with pbotographic memories don't think substantially differently. We already augment ourselves with pcs and phones, and will become increasingly cyborg. Digital minds would have to have some informational losses and uncertainties to be creative. Thought-time would have to be tuned to physicality, to manifestation in actions. These might be digital actions on networks, in which case the times of those relays and programs to interact with would set the clock. With a robotic body, it was ould be that's capacities and energy supplies, and things to engage with such as us. Greater analysis in these times than a human mind, would not I think create a true difference in kind.

The actual qualia of being a digital mind, is probably for fiction and art to think about. I can't think of any truly good hard science fiction about the emergence of artificial sentience, but it must be out there.

Answer 3

First of all, it's not completely known whether or not our minds work on an analogue basis or digital as it currently stands. We know (for instance) that the human eye takes around 70 'images' a second, and then builds a picture of motion upon that. Movies are a massive number of still images strung together at 24 frames per second. This is enough to trick the mind into accepting the series of images as a moving picture. In modern video games, people demand more powerful graphics cards so they can increase their frame rate; the faster the frames refresh, the smoother the action on the screen.

So; let's assume for a moment that the eye worked in a more analogue fashion; a typical motion picture would appear to jerk and would look quite digital to us because we're expecting smooth transitions between frames, especially during more intense movement scenes.

Alternatively, let's assume that the eye was only capable of sampling (say) 10 frames per second. There would be absolutely no difference in our perception between the real world and the moving picture.

From all this, we can extrapolate several ideas.

1) If the universe is digital and our minds and senses are analogue, the world would appear to jerk a little around us.

2) If the universe is analogue and our minds and senses are digital, then the world will always seem smooth to us.

3) If the universe, our senses and our minds are all digital, then the real underlying question is that of frame rate. If our minds (and senses) operate at a faster rate than the universe, our perception would jerk from one 'frame' to the next. If our minds and senses operate at the same (or slower) rate than the universe, then (in theory) our perception would be identical to that as we would experience with an analogue - analogue combination. The underlying physics would be very different, but our perception would be more or less identical.

It is this underlying ratio that brings up a broader question; we may think that the universe is analogue, but what if that is just because it's operating at a very high frame rate? Eventually, the granularity between each universal 'state' in a digital universe becomes so fine that it can no longer be distinguished between a digital and analogue state.

Put another way; at what point of granularity do we decide that a system is so smooth as to be defined as continuous (analog) rather than a series of discrete states (digital)?

This is perhaps the more intriguing question as at certain levels of granularity, both digital and analogue descriptions of the universe (and their resultant predictions) may prove true. Does this mean that a universe that works at that level of granularity is both digital and analogue in nature? The problem soon becomes one of definition and capacity to measure and observe.

Is this exactly what's happening in the Quantum Mechanics space right now? Not for me to say, but getting back to the question at hand; the answer lies on a spectrum of granularity that we may not be able to ever fully measure.