Scott Aaronson has a new 85 page essay up, titled "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine". (Abstract here.) In Section 2.11 (Singulatarianism) he explicitly mentions Eliezer as an influence. But that's just a starting point, and he then moves in a direction that's very far from any kind of LW consensus. Among other things, he suggests that a crucial qualitative difference between a person and a digital upload is that the laws of physics prohibit making perfect copies of a person. Personally, I find the arguments completely unconvincing, but Aaronson is always thought-provoking and fun to read, and this is a good excuse to read about things like (I quote the abstract) "the No-Cloning Theorem, the measurement problem, decoherence, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle, Newcomb's paradox, Boltzmann brains, algorithmic information theory, and the Common Prior Assumption". This is not just a shopping list of buzzwords, these are all important components of the author's main argument. It unfortunately still seems weak to me, but the time spent reading it is not wasted at all.
(1) I agree that we can easily conceive of a world where most entities able to pass the Turing Test are copyable. I agree that it's extremely interesting to think about what such a world would be like --- and maybe even try to prepare for it if we can. And as for how the copyable entities will reason about their own existence -- well, that might depend on the goals of whoever or whatever set them loose! As a simple example, the Stuxnet worm eventually deleted itself, if it decided it was on a computer that had nothing to do with Iranian centrifuges. We can imagine that each copy "knew" about the others, and "knew" that it might need to kill itself for the benefit of its doppelgangers. And as for why it behaved that way --- well, we could answer that question in terms of the code, or in terms of the intentions of the people who wrote the code. Of course, if the code hadn't been written by anyone, but was instead (say) the outcome of some evolutionary process, then we'd have to look for an explanation in terms of that process. But of course it would help to have the code to examine!
(2) You argue that, if I were copyable, then the copies would wonder about the same puzzles that the "uncopyable" version wonders about -- and for that reason, it can't be legitimate even to try to resolve those puzzles by assuming that I'm not copyable. Compare to the following argument: if I were a character in a novel, then that character would say exactly the same things I say for the same reasons, and wonder about the same things that I wonder about. Therefore, when reasoning about (say) physics or cosmology, it's illegitimate even to make the tentative assumption that I'm not a character in a novel. This is a fun argument, but there are several possible responses, among them: haven't we just begged the question, by assuming there is something it's like to be a copyable em or a character in a novel? Again, I don't declare with John Searle that there's obviously nothing that it's like, if you think there is then you need your head examined, etc. etc. On the other hand, even if I were a character in a novel, I'd still be happy to have that character assume it wasn't a character -- that its world was "real" -- and see how far it could get with that assumption.
(3) No, I absolutely don't think that we can learn whether we're copyable or not by "introspecting on the quality of our subjective experience," or that we'll ever be able to do such a thing. The sort of thing that might eventually give us insight into whether we're copyable or not would be understanding the effect of microscopic noise on the sodium-ion channels, whether the noise can be grounded in PMDs, etc. If you'll let me quote from Sec. 2.1 of my essay: "precisely because one can’t decide between conflicting introspective reports, in this essay I’ll be exclusively interested in what can be learned from scientific observation and argument. Appeals to inner experience—including my own and the reader’s—will be out of bounds."
I'm not interested so much in how they will reason, but in how they should reason.
When you say "we" here, do you literally mean "we" or do you mean "biological humans"? Because I can see how understanding the effect of microscop... (read more)