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Bugmaster comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong
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Wait, why not ? If people can be encoded as bit strings -- which is the prerequisite for any kind of a Singularity -- then what's the difference between a bit string that I obtained by scanning a person, and a completely identical bit string that I just happened to randomly generate ?
You make a surprisingly convincing argument for people not being real.
Depends what you mean by "people", and what you mean by "real", really.
I could apply the same argument to rocks, or stars, or any other physical object. They can be encoded as bit strings, too -- well, at least hypothetically speaking.
I suppose the difference is knowing to put the number into your bit string interpreter. Whether that be a computer program or the physical universe.
It's kind of like the arguments for "you can't copyright a number". Well sure, but when you stick .mp3 on the end it isn't just a number any more - it now tells you that you should interpret it.
Agreed, but then, I still disagree with Eliezer when he says that when you generate 2^N possible bitstrings of size N, "you wouldn't expect this procedure to generate any people or make any experiences real". If I can generate all these strings in the first place, I could just as easily feed each one to my person-emulator, to see which of them are valid person-strings. Then I could emulate these people just as I emulate meat-based people whose brains I'd scanned.
It's not too hard to write Eliezer's 2^48 (possibly invalid) games of non-causal-Life to disk; but does that make any of them real? As real as the one in the article?
I am having trouble figuring out what the word "real" means when applied to the game of Life. I do know, however, that if my Life game client had a "load game" function, then it would accept any valid string of bits, regardless of where they came from -- a previously saved game, or a random number generator.