But "consciousness" necessarily requires appropriate responses to the rest of "existence" "now" - how could pre-feeding this *always* be correct especially given the non-deterministic (note, not necessarily non-predetermined) nature of changes in existence ? On 5 Aug 2013, at 10:27, Adam P. Goucher wrote:

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David Makin wrote:

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But, equivalently, we could write the same binary input stream on its initial tape, so this self-contained Turing machine behaves exactly the same as your `computer with a method of sensing the rest of existence'.

No because neither you, nor anyone (or anything) else could predict what that binary stream should be *until the time when that state exists* (true based on either uncertainty in the current physics model or based on my own belief that existence is fractal in nature).

There's no need to predict the future. Equally well one could record the past, and feed that into the machine. The machine wouldn't know that it's being given a recording of past events.

Sincerely,

Adam P. Goucher

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