imagine you're trap inside a PC!

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SONDADAREAS

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Hi to all!

Imagine you're trap inside a PC. On a wall are rows & columns of lights & each row is 8 bit wide ( just a byte!).

On the bottom are the words:

WELCOME! YOU'RE ON A SPACESHIP ON THE WAY TO PLANET ASU! IT'S UP TO YOU TO DECODE WHAT WHAT TRANSDUCERS ARE CONNECTED TO WHAT BYTES!

1. Can you have objective knowledge of the outside world? Just like the CPU of the PC, you are only working with digital patterns.

2. Can you rig-up & program your own PC - that's staring you in the face! -to 'know' you 'objectively' ?

3. Is the brain any better? Please recall that the brain can only process electrochemical pulses send by sense-organs/transducers.

3. Why are philosophers & AI people ignoring the fact that the PC has a striking analogy with Kant's noumenon/phenomenon divide?

peace.
 
this probably addresses not a single one of your questions.. but somehow i feel it may interest you as it is related.

a while ago i read "a new kind of science" by wolfram.. same wolfram as wolfram research. anyway, in the book he describes his extensive study of cellular automata. he talks about minimal requirements that he discovered required to model various systems using cellular automata. as a matter of fact, you can use cellular automata to model a cpu. i think you would find his research interesting.

and it's free.. you can find it here

http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html

edit: i forgot to add.. of particular interest to you would probably be his "Principle of Computational Equivalence" that seems to be the thesis of his book
 
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