cousin_it comments on P/S/A - Sam Harris offering money for a little good philosophy - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Benito 01 September 2013 06:36PM

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Comment author: cousin_it 02 September 2013 10:38:27AM *  0 points [-]

It seems to me that both the "Twin Earth" experiment and the question of "which physical process can be legitimately interpreted as a computational process" can be easily solved if you view them as questions of degree rather than binary:

1) Having an identical twin on another Earth is the same as being uncertain about where you are. If I am uncertain whether water is H2O or XYZ, then my idea of "water" refers to a probabilistic mixture of H2O and XYZ.

2) The degree to which a physical process represents a computational process depends on the simplicity of the program that prints out the latter given the former.