Bruno Marchal writes:
> >> Well, in the case comp will be refuted (for example by predicting that
> >> electrons weigh one ton, or by predicting non eliminable white
> >> rabbits)
> >> , then everyone will be able to guess that those people were
> >> committing
> >> suicide. The problem is that we will probably copy brain at some level
> >> well before refuting comp, if ever.
> >> The comp hyp. entails the existence of possible relative zombies, but
> >> from the point of view of those who accept artificial brains, if they
> >> survive, they will survive where the level has been correctly chosen.
> >> A
> >> linguistic difficulty is that the "where" does not denote a place in a
> >> universe, but many similar "instants" in many consistent histories.
> >
>
>
> > But how good a predictor of the right level having been chosen is 3rd
> > person
> > observable behaviour?
>
>
> Stathis, I don't understand the question. Could you elaborate just a
> few bits, thanks.
I assume that there is some copy of me possible which preserves my 1st person experience. After all, physical copying literally occurs in the course of normal life and I still feel myself to be the same person. But suppose I am offered some artificial means of being copied. The evidence I am presented with is that Fred2 here is a robot who behaves exactly the same as the standard human Fred: has all his memories, a similar personality, similar intellectual abilities, and passes whatever other tests one cares to set him. The question is, how can I be sure that Fred2 really has the same 1st person experiences as Fred? A software engineer might copy a program's "look and feel" without knowing anything about the original program's internal code, his goal being to mimic the external appearance as seen by the end user by whatever means available. Similarly with Fred2, although the hope was to produce a copy with the same 1st person experiences, the only possible research method would have been to produce a copy th
at mimics Fred's behaviour. If Fred2 has 1st person experiences at all, they may be utterly unlike those of Fred. Fred2 may even be aware that he is different but be extremely good at hiding it, because if he were not he would have been rejected in the testing process.
If it could be shown that Fred2 behaves like Fred *and* is structurally similar to Fred then I would be more confident in accepting copying. If behaviour is similar but the underlying mechanism completely different then I would consider that only by accident could 1st person experience be similar.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Tue Dec 05 2006 - 18:01:14 PST