Vassar:

It seems to me that by the generalized anti-zombie principle, just having a complete enough model of Lenin to be certain of his actions is as good as creating him.

As Tarleton said, the jerkiness is for the resultant of Lenin's actions, which being predictable is a resultant of the Alien's actions just as much as Lenin.

It does not seem to me that predicting people is the same as creating them. Let's say you ask me for a glass of orange juice. I go to the refrigerator and find that there is no orange juice, so I try bringing you lemonade instead. When, in a highly sophisticated form of helpfulness, I project that you would-want lemonade if you knew everything I knew about the contents of the refrigerator, I do not thereby create a copy of Michael Vassar who screams that it is trapped inside my head.

Though I'm not absolutely sure of this, and I did once wonder what would happen if, after the Singularity, we were told that everyone we had ever imagined was themselves a person - including our imaginations of other people and our imaginations of ourselves - and they were all liberated from the confines of our heads, and set loose on the world.

Careful Eliezer, the soberishim, the 'open conspiracy' or the 'brights' may be watching. You seem to be coming dangerously close to revealing the Fully Generalized Principle Against Undead that was secretly inscribed by the sane Jew Septimus Browne, in the Vivonumericon.

I understood every word in that but not the message, unless the message was "I liked your post."

Lukas:

All you can say is that the physical adder will most of the time do a 'physical addition' that corresponds to the 'theoretical addition'; but you need to make a lot of assumptions about the environment of the physical adder (it doesn't melt, it doesn't explode etc.), and those assumptions don't need to hold.

I think you are confusing knowing that a system will perform arithmetic, with the system actually performing arithmetic. The latter does happen sometimes, despite all fallible assumptions.