>
> From: Russell Standish <R.Standish.domain.name.hidden>
> [JM wrote]
> >> No one ever suggested it might, so I don't know what you're
> >> talking about. Measure is the amount of consciousness, and effective
> >> probability is proportional to measure.
> >
> >This is all a bogus argument. One cannot quantify conciousness -
> >either an entity is concious, or it is not.
>
> Then answer this: do two people have more consciousness than one
> person? And is it not better to kill one person than two, all else being
> equal?
The first question has no meaning, as one can't quantify conciousness,
and the latter question is an ethical question totally unrelated to
what we're discussing. One can paraphrase it as saying "is it better
to do one bad thing than two bad things" - to which the answer is of
course yes.
> I have always maintained that each implementation of a conscious
> computation has the same amount of measure as any other. You can call
> that the SSA. The QS claim is inconsistent with that.
>
You'd probably better enunciate what you mean by QS claim. Last I
heard, QS was an idea (based on QTI and SSA) that one could engineer a
preferred outcome by comitting suicide (or attempting it, from the
suicider's point of view). What is its claim?
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Dr. Russell Standish Director
High Performance Computing Support Unit,
University of NSW Phone 9385 6967
Sydney 2052 Fax 9385 6965
Australia R.Standish.domain.name.hidden
Room 2075, Red Centre
http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
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Received on Thu Aug 19 1999 - 17:41:48 PDT