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TheOtherDave comments on The Level Above Mine - Less Wrong
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Sure, I agree that one permissible solution is a decoder which produces an organism capable of cloning itself. And while I'm willing to discard as violating the spirit of the thought experiment decoder designs which discard the human DNA in its entirety and create a predefined organism (in much the same sense that I would discard any text-translation algorithm that discarded the input text and printed out the Declaration of Independence as a legitimate translator of the input text), there's a large space of possibilities here.
Would you be willing to consider, i.e. not discard, a decoder that used the human DNA as merely a list of indexes, downloading the required genes from some sort of internal lookup table?
By changing the lookup table, one can dramatically change the resulting organism; and having a different result for every viable human DNA is merely a resut of having a large enough lookup table. It would be, to extend your metaphor, like a text-translation algorithm that returned the Declaration of Independance if given as input Alice in Wonderland, and returned Alice in Wonderland if given Hamlet.
(considers)
I would like to say "no", but can't think of any coherent reason to discard such a design.
Yeah, OK; point made.