IL comments on Created Already In Motion - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 July 2008 06:03AM

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Comment author: IL 01 July 2008 03:06:55PM 0 points [-]

Also, I take it that this means you don't believe in the whole, "if a program implements consciousness, then it must be conscious while sitting passively on the hard disk" thing. I remember this came up before in the quantum series and it seemed to me absurd, sort of for the reasons you say.

I used that as an argument against timeless physics: If you could have consciousness in a timeless universe, than this means that you could simulate a conscious being without actually running the simulation, you could just put the data on the hard drive. I'm still waiting out for an answer on that one!

Comment author: DanielLC 21 June 2012 03:34:14AM 3 points [-]

In order for it to be analogous, you'd have to put the contents of the memory for every step of the program as its running on the hard drive. The program itself isn't sufficient.

Since there's no way to get the memory every step without actually running the program, it doesn't seem that paradoxical.

Also, if time was an explicit dimension, that would just mean that the results of the program are spread out on a straight line aligned along the t-axis. I don't see why making it a curvy line makes it any different.

Comment author: Kenny 05 April 2013 02:44:10PM 1 point [-]

Huh? A "timeless universe" still contains 'time'; it's just not fundamental. Consciousness may be a lot of things, but it's definitely not static in 'time', i.e. it's dynamic with respect to causality.

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