I've enjoyed the Mindhacks tip to write in books -- If you can see how to write it better, summarize it better, index it better, or organize it better, doing so is an active use of the information.
Incremental synchronizations are interesting -- if Horcruxes can get out of sync, then the "soul" recovered from each may develop conflicting objectives.
Perhaps Harry will do something with his personal copy of Hermione and a hack of Merlin's computer.
Just hours before:
"Of course there is!" Harry said. The boy suddenly looked a bit more vulnerable. "You mean there isn't a copy of me living in your head?"
There was, she realized; and not only that, it talked in Harry's exact voice.
Given Voldemort's novel formatting of his brain, Harry's apparently already got the hardware to contain or access one extra soul, how much more would he need for another?
It seems that it would be easier to keep one's identity small the less one deviates from the norms.
Literally screaming racial slurs in a person's face is an offensive act. Acting cool may be one good defensive strategy, but other strategies are not unwarranted.
Maybe I'm having a problem with 'offended' as a mental state as opposed to something like 'angry'. 'Angry' seems more of a mental state or feeling within yourself, while 'offended' seems less of a feeling but more a description of an act that you are attributing to the other person.
I read this post more as "Don't get angry" than as "Don't get offended" or "Don't feel attacked"
How much loss is acceptable in the reconstruction?
I'd imagine the reconstructed minds would be happier with their own fidelity than the deconstructed minds. And that the reconstructor might trade off some fidelity for utility towards whatever purpose they had in doing the reconstruction.
I see http://lesswrong.com/lw/b93/brain_preservation/ and http://lesswrong.com/lw/bg0/cryonics_without_freezers_resurrection/ -- are there other good discussions?
The gap between creating a working mind and producing an exact reconstruction seems large.
My roomba does not just keep sweeping until it runs out of power. It terminates quickly in a small space and terminates slower in a large space. To terminate it must somehow sense the size of the space it is working in and compare it to some register of how long it has operated.
Roombas try to build up a (very limited) model of how big the room is from the longest uninterrrupted traversal it can sense. See "Can you tell me more about the cleaning algorithm that the Roomba uses?" in http://www.botjunkie.com/2010/05/17/botjunkie-interview-nancy-dussault-smith-on-irobots-roomba/
I'm confused about the "hide" part of the initial task, or the "fooling" that needs to be unfooled. The objective function rewards ineffective fooling.
It seems you simply mean "store" such that you can find it.
Eliezer covered some of this in description of the twenty-ply GLUT being not infinite, but still much larger than the universe. The number of plys in the conversation is the number of "iterations" simulated by the GLUT. For an hour-long Turing test, the GLUT would still not be infinite, (i.e., still describe the Chinese Room thought experiment) and, for the purposes of the thought experiment, it would still be computable without infinite resources.
Certainly, drastic economies could be had by using more complicated programming, but the outputs would be indistinguishable.
If the models depend on factors which cannot be reliably forecast (e.g. "PDO, AMO, and solar cycles" above), then it is a bit of a fake explanation and you can't use them as reliable inputs to a forecast model. Would it be it reasonable to use Akasofu's sine-wave extrapolation of the multi-decadal oscillation in light of the prior two observed "cycles" ?
Also the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation indices are measures of the response of the system, and treating them as a driver of the system smuggles some of the dependent response variables into the supposedly independent predictor variables.