Re: The Meaning of Life

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2007 11:52:55 +0100

Le 07-janv.-07, à 19:21, Brent Meeker a écrit :

> And does it even have to be very good? Suppose it made a sloppy copy
> of me that left out 90% of my memories - would it still be "me"? How
> much fidelity is required for Bruno's argument? I think not much.


The argument does not depend at all of the level of fidelity. Indeed I
make clear (as much as possible) that comp is equivalent to the belief
there is a level of substitution of myself (3-person) such that I
(1-person) survive a functional substitution done at that level. Then I
show no machine can know what is her level of substitution (and thus
has to bet or guess about it).

This is also the reason why comp is not jeopardized by the idea that
the environment is needed: just put the environment in the definition
of my "generalized brain".

Imagine someone who say that his brain is the entire galaxy, described
at the level of all interacting quantum strings. This can be captured
by giant (to say the least) but finite, rational complex matrices. Of
course the thought experiment with the "yes doctor" will look very
non-realist, but *in fine*, all what is needed (for the reversal) is
that the Universal Dovetailer get through the state of my generalized
brain, and the UD will get it even if my "state" is the state of the
whole galaxy, or more.

If it happens that my state is the galaxy state AND that the galaxy
state cannot be captured in a finite ('even giant) way(*), then we are
just out of the scope of the comp- reasoning. This is possible because
comp may be wrong.

Bruno

(*) Note this *is* very speculative. Mathematically we can study
non-computationalist "physical realities" but there is no clues at all
that "our" physical neighborhood would contradict comp.




http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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Received on Mon Jan 08 2007 - 05:56:11 PST

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