Comment on Open Thread: April 2010

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 08:30:34 GMT

Right, so I suppose what I should've said is that if I want to make some arbitrarily small change to the decisions made by mind X (measured as some appropriate quantity of "change") then there exists some change I could make to X's source code such that no decision would deviate by more than the desired amount from X's original decision.

How to measure "change in decisions" and "change in source code" is all a bit fluffy but the point is just that there is a continuum of source code modifications from those with negligible effect to those with large effect. This makes it hard to believe that all modifications can be classified as either "X is now a different person" or "X is the same person" with no middle ground.

And, if on the contrary middle ground is allowed, then what does time consistency mean in such a case?

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