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HonoreDB comments on Could/would an FAI recreate people who are information-theoretically dead by modern standards? - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: AlexMennen 22 January 2011 09:11PM

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Comment author: HonoreDB 23 January 2011 01:05:41AM 2 points [-]

In the quantum cryptography case, the attacker can be said to have "lost information" in the measuring because the sender still has that information (and the receiver has half of it, if I remember correctly). So it's still relevant. But for a datum about the brain to be lost irrecoverably, it has to have never affected anything, including macroscopic facts about my brain, and it cannot have been determined by any macroscopic facts about my brain. Which means the datum never actually existed.

Comment author: Manfred 23 January 2011 03:27:23AM *  0 points [-]

It exists only statistically - information seems to be more like entropy than like energy. That's quantum mechanics. If you measure an atom to have spin up, it COULD be because it was alway spin up, or it could be that it was spin anything-but-down and you just got lucky. You might say "but since the fact that it was spin-x didn't affect the result, how do we know it existed at all?" Well, that's what bell's inequality is for, basically. The data in your brain isn't a hidden variable, it's part of the quantum state, and so is subject to being messed with when measured.

Comment author: HonoreDB 23 January 2011 03:50:33PM 0 points [-]

This looks like a fascinating concept that I'll have to read up on.