= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
DanielLC comments on Torture Simulated with Flipbooks - 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 (31)
What you've said makes sense to me, that the flipbooks do not constitute a calculation. However, it feels like there is a fuzzy boundary somewhere nearby, similar to the fuzzy boundary of what constitutes life. Maybe there is a information theory explanation which relates the two.
If the flipbooks contain enough information to continue the calculation then they are the same as a backup. Ok, so a flipbook is a series of closely spaced backups. What constitutes a calculation? I've read about these things, but I've never tried to work it out for myself before.
A backup is a static result of a calculation. Static results are static. They don't count as alive, they don't count as a calculation.
What counts as a calculation? I'm getting stuck. Let's say we do the calculation as a state machine. You have static states that are updated according certain rules. State 1 determines/causes state 2. The calculation is implemented somewhere. So there are patterns of matter/energy that represent the states and represent the arithmetic needed to change states. I guess the calculation is here?
It can't be that it's static. Time doesn't exist, at least, not as a basic part of physics.
Still, it seems like the universe is doing the calculation. After all, where else would the output come from?
This makes me wonder, if we were in a universe exactly like this one, except that the laws of physics specified everything exactly, and it matching this universe was a total coincidence, would people have subjective experience?
The problem here is the 'total coincidence'. This is analogous to watching a video of someone being tortured that was randomly generated. No one is being harmed and it only seems like it because of a massive coincidence. There is still enough data to specify the brain state it your scenario so, given our current knowledge about the brain, it is more likely to have conscious experience than the videotape one. Even with the naive concept of time, it would be very hard to define what constitutes a calculation, and it looks even harder without one.
What does it mean, "specified everything exactly"?
This sounds like a slightly modified (at most) version of timeless physics. A function would deterministically assign arrows to each N-dimensional set of coordinates without even looking at its neighborhood, and this function just happens to define an N+2D surface. Points on the surface would still show the relationships we call causality, and by assumption they still exhibit the functional equivalent of our consciousness.
If you mean Many-Worlds does not apply to that reality, well, we don't know for sure that our reality doesn't work by Bohmian mechanics. Maybe we should give this a larger probability. In that case I don't see myself changing my own probability of having subjective experience.