Scott Aaronson has a new 85 page essay up, titled "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine". (Abstract here.) In Section 2.11 (Singulatarianism) he explicitly mentions Eliezer as an influence. But that's just a starting point, and he then moves in a direction that's very far from any kind of LW consensus. Among other things, he suggests that a crucial qualitative difference between a person and a digital upload is that the laws of physics prohibit making perfect copies of a person. Personally, I find the arguments completely unconvincing, but Aaronson is always thought-provoking and fun to read, and this is a good excuse to read about things like (I quote the abstract) "the No-Cloning Theorem, the measurement problem, decoherence, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle, Newcomb's paradox, Boltzmann brains, algorithmic information theory, and the Common Prior Assumption". This is not just a shopping list of buzzwords, these are all important components of the author's main argument. It unfortunately still seems weak to me, but the time spent reading it is not wasted at all.
Absolutely, here's the relevant quote:
"The question also has an “empirical core” that could turn out one way or another, depending on details of the brain’s physical organization that are not yet known. In particular, does the brain possess what one could call a clean digital abstraction layer: that is, a set of macroscopic degrees of freedom that
(1) encode everything relevant to memory and cognition,
(2) can be accurately modeled as performing a classical digital computation, and
(3) “notice” the microscopic, quantum-mechanical degrees of freedom at most as pure randomnumber sources, generating noise according to prescribed probability distributions?"
You could do worse things with your time than read the whole thing, in my opinion.
Thank you for the quote! (I tried to read the article, but after a few pages it seemed to me the author makes too many digressions, and I didn't want to know his opinions on everything, only on the technical problems with scanning brains.)
Do I understand it correctly that the question is, essentially, whether there exists a more efficient way of modelling the brain than modelling all particles of the brain?
Because if there is no such efficient way, we can probably forget about running the uploaded brains in real time.
Then, even assuming we could successful... (read more)