Hm… As described, “fuzzle” = “chosen course of action”, or, “I choose”. Things labelled “fuzzle” are sent to the action system – this is all we’re told about “fuzzle”. But anything and everything that a system decides, chooses, sets out, to do, are sent to the action system. Not just moral things.

If we want to distinguish moral things from actions in general, we need to say more.

Only in terms of how this actually gets into a human mind, there is a dynamic first: before anyone has any idea of fuzzleness, things are already being sent to the action system. Then we say, “Oh, these are things are fuzzle!”, i.e. these are the type of things that get sent to the action system. Then someone else tells us that something else is fuzzle, and right away it gets sent to the action system too.

It seems to me that much of the frustration in my life prior to a few years ago has been due to thinking
that all other human minds necessarily and consistently implement modus ponens and the Dynamic: “When the belief pool contains “X is right/desired/maximizing-my-utility-function/good”, send X to action system”

These days my thoughts are largely occupied with considering what causal dynamic could cause modus poens and the above Dynamic to be implemented in a human mind.

IL: Timeless physics retains causality. Change some of the data on the hard drive and the other data won’t change as an inferential result. There are unsolved issues in this domain, but probably not easy ones. The process of creating the data on the hard drive might be necessarily conscious, for instance, or might not. I think that this was discussed earlier when we discussed giant look-up tables.

Also, I take it that this means you don’t believe in the whole, “if a program implements consciousness, then it must be conscious while sitting passively on the hard disk” thing. I remember this came up before in the quantum series and it seemed to me absurd, sort of for the reasons you say.

I used that as an argument against timeless physics: If you could have consciousness in a timeless universe, than this means that you could simulate a conscious being without actually running the simulation, you could just put the data on the hard drive.
I’m still waiting out for an answer on that one!

Also, I take it that this means you don’t believe in the whole, “if a program implements consciousness, then it must be conscious while sitting passively on the hard disk” thing. I remember this came up before in the quantum series and it seemed to me absurd, sort of for the reasons you say.

I think this also has deeper implications for the philosophy of math — the desire to fully axiomitize is still deeply ingrained despite Goedel, but in some ways this seems like a more fundamental challenge. You can write down as many rules as you want for string manipulation, but the realization of those rules in actual manipulation remains ineffable on paper.

So shouldn’t we distinguish between the symbols physics::dynamic and human_brain::dynamic? (In a way, me reading the word “dynamic” uses more computing power than running any Java applet could on current computers…)