Sha Xin Wei

  • The unsolved hard problem of consciousness: the gulf between “internal consciousness” and physical observables, implies that no computational techniques based on physical sensing can yield certificate of intention.   
  • Any choice of measure, or instrument of measurement, makes some aspect of experience legible, and others illegible.
  • Any sensor makes some feature of activity visible and all other features invisible.
  • Movement, as a temporal phenomenon, escapes synchronic representation.
  • Experience > perception > data.  Examples abound from psychoacoustics and psychovision, and sensorimotor studies, gestalt, phenomenology.
  • Felt experience (Eugene Gendlin), and tacit dimension (Michael Polanyi, Satinder Gill).
  • All algorithms on Turing-equivalent machines (i.e. on any digital computer) suffer from absolute limits:
  • The space of computable functions is, in a strict sense, negligible as a subset of the space of all functions on the same domain and range.  In particular, the space of functions mapping between finite discrete subsets of the reals is of measure zero in the space of all continuous (measurable) functions on the reals.
  • Undecidability puts a strong (fatal) bound on what can or cannot be amenable to any algorithm.

-Sha Xin Wei