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yttrium comments on Weighting the probability of being a mind by the quantity of the matter composing the computer that calculates that mind - Less Wrong
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Comments (23)
If I take a 1 kg computer and put a 1 kg rock on top of it, do I now have 2 kg computer? Are you only counting the "essential" weight, and if so, how do you define "essential"? What if I have a 100 kg computer, of which 1 kg is running a sentient program, and 99 kg is playing Solitaire? How do you decide how much of the computations are part of the sentience?
What if we run a computer, record its state at each clock cycle, and broadcast those states to a billion TV screens? Do we now weight the computer nine orders of magnitude more than we would otherwise?
The rock on top of the computer wouldn't count into the "amount doing the computation". Apart from that, I agree that weight shouldn't be the right quantity. A better way to formulate what I am getting at would maybe be that "probability of being a mind is an extensive physical quantity". I have updated the post accordingly.
Regarding your second paragraph: No, the TV screens aren't part of the matter that does the computation.