[retrac]

If the computational hypothesis for minds and brains is true, and it is only conjecture though a tempting one, I can only see one way out. Analogies are a wicked thing to indulge in here. But bear with me.

If an engineer designs a computer that computes on encrypted information, from an observer's naive perspective, the entire contents of memory is rewritten with a random value for each step. Yet there is a mathematical relationship between those seemingly random bits and whatever is encoded. Even just using some error correction and non-deterministic parallel processing and it might look pretty much like noise if you don't have the decoder ring.

Something like that is the only explanation I can come up with. Information is stored at a level of abstraction in a structure that is maintained by being continuously re-encoded in the ephemeral computations at a lower level.

[michaelerule]

If I understood correctly, I think I agree with your loose analogy. I've tried combining some error correction with ongoing re-learning. It stabilizes things against drift, but not indefinitely. This is all in an extremely preliminary cartoon sketch of a model. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.08.433413v1....

[jakeogh]

Digital abstractions seem practically worthless when the hardware is not explicitly designed to suppress non binary behavior.

Perhaps analog FPGA's are interesting windows https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23432601

[kevin_thibedeau]

The Xilinx 6200 series could safely run randomized bitstreams without damaging itself. Genetic algorithms could be applied to create circuits that worked despite being riddled with what would normally be fatal design flaws.