TheOtherDave comments on Timeless Identity - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 June 2008 08:16AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 October 2013 09:51:37PM 3 points [-]

Suppose I get in something that is billed as a transporter, but which does not preserve computational continuity. Suppose, for example, that it destructively scans my body, sends the information to the destination (a process which is not instantaneous, and during which no computation can take place), and reconstructs an identical body using that information out of local raw materials at my destination.

I don't know what "computation" or "computational continuity" means if it's considered to be separate from causal continuity, and I'm not sure other philosophers have any standard idea of this either. From the perspective of the Planck time, your brain is doing extremely slow 'computations' right now, it shall stand motionless a quintillion ticks and more before whatever arbitrary threshold you choose to call a neural firing. Or from a faster perspective, the 50 years of intervening time might as well be one clock tick. There can be no basic ontological distinction between fast and slow computation, and aside from that I have no idea what anyone in this thread could be talking about if it's distinct from causal continuity.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 01 October 2013 10:29:46PM 5 points [-]

(shrug) It's Mark's term and I'm usually willing to make good-faith efforts to use other people's language when talking to them. And, yes, he seems to be drawing a distinction between computation that occurs with rapid enough updates that it seems continuous to a human observer and computation that doesn't. I have no idea why he considers that distinction important to personal identity, though... as far as I can tell, the whole thing depends on the implicit idea of identity as some kind of ghost in the machine that dissipates into the ether if not actively preserved by a measurable state change every N microseconds. I haven't confirmed that, though.