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soreff comments on Getting Over Dust Theory - Less Wrong
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I tend to ignore the dust theory simply because entities which are implemented as scattered states throughout spacetime can't be interacted with. Even just inverting the order of the states is enough to make interaction impossible - two observers with opposite time directions don't see each other as having any memories of past interactions.
What makes such interactions a requirement?
Thanks for the response! One way of looking at whether to take implementations of minds scattered across disconnected dust seriously is to look at the sets of minds we do know about and extrapolate from there. All existing minds that we know of (human, animal - even including any computation that responds to the world - even down to a thermostat) consists of causally connected states. "Dust" minds have at least the problems that:
since we can't interact with them, what would constitute an experiment to demonstrate that they are really there? Are they observable in any way?
since the causal processes in the world can't interact with them, they can't be tuned by the evolutionary processes that created us or other minds, which again puts them outside the set of minds we would extrapolate from those we've observed
Do they survive Occam's razor?
That's not data. That's a definition.
I'm not convinced. For instance, I can point to plenty of examples of logic inverters that respond to causally to changes in their input logic states by making the inverse changes in their outputs. How does one slice and dice the states of the physical world to label some disconnected set of them as a "dust" inverter? In other words, if one explicitly enlarges the definition of a computing system to include "dust" systems, can one point to a correspondingly enlarged set of data on working examples?
I don't know, but it's not relevant. The fact that you can't usefully define "mind" or "computing system" to include dust, doesn't tell us anything about the ordinary definition of "mind" that does not include dust.
Your response is irrelevant to the central topic of this discussion. The entire point of the whole discussion is whether it makes sense to include dust in the class of places we consider as possible computing systems or not.
What I'm saying is this. You're faced with various ways in which dust-based systems differ from ordinary ones (e.g., you can't interact with them). Then you have two options: either say dust-based systems don't perform computation; or say computation doesn't require interaction. The difference between the two is solely in the definition of "computation".
Discussing the appropriate definition of "computation" is a worthwhile discussion to have. But you have to be aware that you won't get any more information out of this deliberation than you put into it.