Re: a description of you + a description of billiard ball can bruise you?

From: Stephen Paul King <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 18:22:03 -0400

Dear Johathan,

    I am trying to address the point of how we consider the interactions and
communications between minds, simulated or otherwise. I do not, question the
idea that simulated "minds" would be indistinguishable from "real" minds,
especially from a 1st person view. I am asking about how such minds can
interact such that notions of "cause and effect" and, say, signal to noise
ratios" are coherent notions.

    Additionally, I still would like to understand how we can continue to
wonder about computations without ever considering the costs in resources
associated. We can not tacitly assume abstract perpetual motion machines to
power our abstract machines, or can we?

Stephen

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Colvin" <jcolvin.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 5:33 PM
Subject: RE: a description of you + a description of billiard ball can
bruise you?


> Bruno's claim is a straightforward consequence of Strong AI; that a
> simulated mind would behave in an identical way to a "real" one, and would
> experience the same "qualia". There's no special "interface" required
> here;
> the simulated mind and the simulated billiard ball are in the same
> "world",
> ie. at the same level of simulation. As far as the simulated person is
> concerned, the billiard ball is "real". Of course, the simulation can also
> contain a simulation of the billiard ball (2nd level simulation), which
> will
> equally be unable to bruise the simulated person, and so on ad infinitum.
> If
> we take Bostrom's simulation argument seriously, we all exist in some Nth
> level simulation, while our simulated billiard ball exists at the (N+1)th
> level.
>
> Jonathan Colvin
Received on Tue May 17 2005 - 18:27:17 PDT