Jacques Mallah wrote:
>One could regard Windows 98 as a program,
>or as input to the more basic program of the CPU; it's an artificial
>distinction.
Perhaps for the 3-person point of view. Trivialy idiotic from the
1-person point of view. I will not believe that you don't see the
difference between Jacques Mallah *as* the person Jacques Mallah
(the one I'm talking to right now), and Jacques Mallah as an
input to Gaia or the Universal Wave function.
If you blur the relative inplementation frontier, then you confirm
my feeling you will solve your implementation problem by making
the comp-level-of-substitution arbitrarily low.
If you are willing to accept an artificial brain then you or
your physician must make a cut somewhere.
Quite sure(°) that distinction is not even definissable from
the "objective" point of view (making the physician's decision
hard, to say the least). But, unless you are the``Pure
Empty Whole Consciousness Itself", if you are able to distinguish
just one thing from yourself, you, the 1-you !, will introduce,
happily or not, that distinction.
(°) I proved that. But a lot of people have foreseen that (Post,
Turing, Benacerraf, Chihara, Wang, Reinhardt, and even Penrose in his
second book on the subject).
Ref. in
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal
> I don't quite follow you, but I don't really want to. I think you
>have just not absorbed the lesson that measure is proportional to the
>number of copies, *not* the number of '1st person' distinctions.
1) So you *do* understand the distinction, in some sense, don't you?.
2) You don't follow me indeed. I DO believe that the measure is
proportional to the number of copies. I just aknowledge that the notion
of copies is not easy to define (and I know you know too!). Now the concept
of "first person" (introduced in physics by Galileo, progressing a
little bit with Einstein, progressing tremendously with Everett, IMO)
can at least be seen just as a philosophical tool helping to realise
the essential relativity of the (computational, quantum) states.
So, although the measure is linked (plausibly ``proportionaly") to the
(transfinite?) number of copies, what we must explain, in fine,
are our 1, 1-plural, experiences.
When you say (jokingly, for sure) ...
> I deny that such a [1/3]-distinction exists for me to be able to deny :-)
... you are like that dentist who anesthetizes his own teeth before
treating the teeth of his patient. This is quite coherent with your
other distinction blurring:
> There's no difference between those two things.
where the two things were a) an infinitely long program
b) a short program + an infinitely long input.
But here too I AGREE with you! You should really read more
carefully my posts before answering :-).
I was talking about a short program/state (think about a state of
your artificial digital body existing with comp) relatively
to an indetermined (infinitely long) computation. That indetermined (infinitely long) computation looks more like a *set* of
(infinitely long) computations.
By all your distinction-blurring you dissolve problems.
That old sort of trick does not solves problems.
>From your URL it seems to me you are aware of the mind-body problem,
but like some physicist (BTW Congratulation!), you are still
trying to put the mind under the carpet.
Let me ask you a question:
Suppose that either:
1) You are anesthetized, cooled, scanned, annihilated at A, and the
information is send at B, where you are reconstituted.
2) or You are anesthetized, cooled, scanned, annihilated at A, and the
information is send at B and C. At B you are reconstituted, but at C the
information is destroyed.
3) or You are anesthetized and put in the Schroedinger-cat's box.
>From an older post of you I can infer that you believe you will survive
with certainty to 1). Will you survive with certainty 2) ?
And, in that case, why will you not survive 3) ?
Bruno
Received on Tue Feb 22 2000 - 03:39:12 PST