Open Thread, November 1 - 7, 2013

witzvo

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

There's no brief answer. I've been slowly gravitating towards, but am not yet convinced, by the suspicion that making a computer out of twice as much material causes there to be twice as much person inside. Reason: No exact point where splitting a flat computer in half becomes a separate causal process, similarity to behavior of Born probabilities. But that's not an update to the anthropic trilemma per se.

That seems to be seriously GAZP violating. Trying to figure out how to put my thoughts on this into words but... There doesn't seem to be anywhere that the data is stored that could "notice" the difference. The actual program that is being the person doesn't contain a "realness counter". There's nowhere in the data that could "notice" the fact that there's, well, more of the person. (Whatever it even means for there to be "more of a person")

Personally, I'm inclined in the opposite direction, that even N separate copi... (read more)

14Armok_GoB13y

Hmm, conditional on that being the case, do you also believe that the closer to physics the mind is the more person it is in it? Example: action potentials encoded in the position of rods in a babbage engine vs. spread over fragmented ram used by a functional programing language using lazy evaluation in the cloud.