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Comment by jamestc

He doesn't suggest that human nature is more than physics, he is saying that consciousness isn't computable. If neural subsystems are a hierarchically arranged and internally generated chaotic dynamic activity, there is the problem of long-term predictions and causal inference.

>It may seem paradoxical that a deterministic phenomenon is inherently unpredictable, but in systems that exhibit chaotic behavior, small uncertainties are amplified over time by the nonlinear interaction of a few elements. The upshot is that behavior that is predictable in the short run becomes intrinsically unpredictable in the long term. As a result, physiologists cannot make strict causal inferences from the level of individual neurons to that of neural mass actions, nor from the level of receptor activity to internal dynamics. The causal connection between past and future is cut.

http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/freemanwww/manuscripts/IC13/90.ht...

parent jamestc 13 years ago

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