= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
PhilGoetz comments on The conscious tape - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (113)
A powerful computer in a sealed box is about to be fired away from the Earth at the speed of light; it will never produce output and we'll never see it again. From the point of view of perspective 1, the whole program is thus equivalent to a gigantic no-op. Nonetheless, I'd rather that the program running on it simulated conscious beings in Utopia than conscious beings in Hell. This I think forces me to perspective 2: that actually doing the calculations makes a moral difference.
EDIT: the "speed of light" thing was a mistake. Make that "close to the speed of light".
The speed of light qualification is interesting, because it may relate to the static aspect of the "conscious tape". The computer is conscious in its reference frame; but since that clock is stopped, that consciousness will never begin.
As I observe to Vladimir_M, the "speed of light" thing was a mistake. I just wanted to make sure no-one ever observed any output from the computer under any circumstances.
You could always just hide it in the forest near the oft-considered fallen tree.
No, I still think it's interesting. Define time as a function of entropy (eg., "one second" means the time over which entropy increases by a constant amount). Time is stopped in the piece of paper's reference frame, because the paper is static, and therefore has no entropy change, and therefore no passage of time.