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RichardKennaway comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong
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Still, I don't think you could compress the content of 1000 brains into one. (And I'm not sure about two brains, either. Maybe the brains of two six-year-olds into that of a 25-year-old.)
I argue that my brain right now contains a lossless copy of itself and itself two words ago!
Getting 1000 brains in here would take some creativity, but I'm sure I can figure something out...
But this is all rather facetious. Breaking the quote's point would require me to be able to compute the (legitimate) results of the computations of an arbitrary number of arbitrarily different brains, at the same speed as them.
Which I can't.
For now.
I'd argue that your brain doesn't even contain a lossless copy of itself. It is a lossless copy of itself, but your knowledge of yourself is limited. So I think that Nick Szabo's point about the limits of being able to model other people applies just as strongly to modelling oneself. I don't, and cannot, know all about myself -- past, current, or future, and that must have substantial implications about something or other that this lunch hour is too small to contain.
How much knowledge of itself can an artificial system have? There is probably some interesting mathematics to be done -- for example, it is possible to write a program that prints out an exact copy of itself (without having access to the file that contains it), the proof of Gödel's theorem involves constructing a proposition that talks about itself, and TDT depends on agents being able to reason about their own and other agents' source codes. Are there mathematical limits to this?
I never meant to say that I could give you an exact description of my own brain and itself ε ago, just that you could deduce one from looking at mine.