Hi Marty,
On 19 Sep 2009, at 02:37, m.a. wrote:
> I don't really remember what saying yes to the doctor
> entails.
> If it signifies a willingness to be cloned by computation, shouldn't
> we be
> saying yes to the Star Trek technician who controls the
> transporter? m.a.
I am not sure I have seen the precise technic of Star Trek
transporter, but if I remember well, the original is always
annihilated, a bit like in quantum teleportation, which is something
very different from the classical comp transportation. With this one,
like with the digital doctor, you are 'read and cut', and then pasted
somewhere in virtue of your classical machine functioning, at some
level of description. Saying "yes" to the comp-doctor is a sort of
quasi operational way to accept the digital mechanist hypothesis. It
helps to understand how *you* are immaterial relatively to your
probable neighborhood, given that you could in principle change your
body every morning. Then you are duplicable, like a piece of software,
and this leads to the comp indeterminacy.
Eventually you can understand that a digital machine cannot see the
difference between "reality", "virtuality", and "arithmetic" (with the
Movie Graph Argument).
Technically, the reasoning goes through even if we are quantum
machine, despite the fact that they are not clonable, because they
need only to be "preparable" in the quantum sense, but this is
something we can go back later.
I don't see how comp can be false without introducing actual infinite
minds and matters.
OK?
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Sat Sep 19 2009 - 09:06:06 PDT