On Nov 22, 2008, at 6:52 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> Which leads again to the problem of partial zombies. What is your
> objection to saying that the looked up computation is also conscious?
> How would that be inconsistent with observation, or lead to logical
> contradiction?
I can only answer this in the context of Bostrom's "Duplication" or
"Unification" question. Let's say that within our Conway's Life
universe, one particular creature feels a lot of pain. After the run
is over, if we load the Initial State back into the array and iterate
the rules again, is another experience of pain occurring? If you think
"yes", you accept Duplication by Bostrom's definition. If you say
"no", you accept Unification.
Duplication is more intuitive to me, and you might say that my thought
experiment is aimed at Duplicationists. In that context, I don't
understand why playing back the lookup table as a movie should create
another experience of pain. None of the actual Conway's Life
computations are being performed. We could just print them out on
(very large) pieces of paper and flip them like a book. Is this
supposed to generate an experience of pain? What if we just lay out
all the pages in a row and move our eyes across them? What if we lay
them out randomly and move our eyes across them? And so on. I argue
that if running the original computation a second time would create a
second experience of pain, we can generate a "partial zombie".
Stathis, Brent, and Bruno have all suggested that there is no "partial
zombie" problem in my argument. Is that because you all accept
Unification? Or am I missing something else?
-- Kory
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Received on Sun Nov 23 2008 - 09:49:09 PST