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rkyeun comments on The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle - Less Wrong
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"But you see the importance of the question, "How far can you generalize the Anti-Zombie Argument and have it still be valid?""
Hmmm... I can see three different possible generalizations:
1). Any Turing-equivalent device which implements the same algorithms that you do *is* you, in every ethical and philosophical sense of the word. 2). There are no mysterious "properties" in the universe which can exist or not exist independently of what the quarks and leptons are doing. 3). Physics, and all the larger-scale mental structures based on physics, are topologically continuous (no large-scale effects for arbitrarily small causes).
1) Quantum phenomenon -- ie, the universe and any given subsets of it you care to name -- are not Turing-equivalent. The universe has no problem factoring quantum configurations which may or may not represent prime numbers in linear time into amplitude distributions that overlap whenever they aren't prime. 2) There is nothing mysterious about the universe, correct. It is lawful. There are things mysterious about our crudely hand-drawn maps of the territory. 3) Arbitrarily small cause: The big bang. Large-scale effect: The universe.
(Probably. We can't be sure of this.)
Turing-equivalent usually means "able to simulate and be simulated by a Turing machine". In this sense (almost) all the current theories of quantum physics are Turing-equivalent. The only thing that quantum computers might be able to do is go exponentially faster. But you can still simulate quantum events on a classical computer, it just takes a long time.