I don't understand why you consider the measures of the programs that do the
simulations. The ''real'' measure should be derived from the algorithmic
complexity of the laws of physics that describe how the computers/brains
work. If you know for certain that a computation will be performed in this
universe, then it doesn't matter how it is performed.
The algorithmic complexity of the program needed to simulate a brain refers
to a ''personal universe''. You can think of the brain as a machine that is
simulating a virtual world in which the qualia we experience exist. That
world also exists independent of our brain in a universe of its own. This
world has a very small measure defined by the very large algorithmic
complexity of the program needed to specify the brain.
Saibal
From: ""Hal Finney"" <hal.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 06:35 PM
Subject: Re: Teleportation thought experiment and UD+ASSA
>
> Bruno writes:
> > Hal,
> >
> > It seems to me that you are introducing a notion of physical
universe,=20
> > and then use it to reintroduce a notion of first person death, so
that=20
> > you can bet you will be the one "annihilated" in Brussels.
>
> I should first mention that I did not anticipate the conclusion that
> I reached when I did that analysis. I did not expect to conclude that
> teleportation like this would probably not work (speaking figurately).
> This was not the starting point of the analysis, but the conclusion.
>
> The starting point was the framework I have described previously, which
> can be stated very simply as that the measure of an information pattern
> comes from the universal distribution of Kolmogorov. I then applied this
> analysis to specific information patterns which represent subjective,
> first person lifetime experiences. I concluded that the truncated version
> which ends when the teleportation occurs would probably have higher
> measure than the ones which proceed through and beyond the teleportation.
>
> Although I worked in terms of a specific physical universe, that is
> a short-cut for simplicity of exposition. The general case is to simply
> ask for the K measure of each possible first-person subjective life
> experience - what is the shortest program that produces each one. I
> assume that the shortest program will in fact have two parts, one which
> creates a universe and the second which takes that universe as input
> and produces the first-person experience record as output.
>
> This leads to a Schmidhuber-like ensemble where we would consider
> all possible universes and estimate the contribution of each one to
> the measure of a particular first-person experience. It is important
> though to keep in mind that in practice the only universe which adds
> non-negligible measure would be the one we are discussing. In other
> words, consider the first person experience of being born, living your
> life, travelling to Brussels and stepping into a teleportation machine.
> A random, chaotic universe would add negligibly to the measure of this
> first-person life experience. Likewise for a universe which only evolves
> six-legged aliens on some other planet. So in practice it makes sense
> to restrict our attention to the (approximately) one universe which has
> third-person objective events that do add significant measure to the
> instantiation of these abstract first-person experiences.
>
>
> > You agree that this is just equivalent of negating the comp
hypothesis.=20
> > You would not use (classical) teleportation, nor accept a digital=20
> > artificial brain, all right? Do I miss something?
>
> It is perhaps best to say that I would not do these things
> *axiomatically*. Whether a particular teleportation technology would
> be acceptable would depend on considerations such as I described in my
> previous message. It's possible that the theoretical loss of measure for
> some teleportation technology would be small enough that I would do it.
>
> As far as using an artificial brain, again I would look to this kind of
> analysis. I have argued previously that a brain which is much smaller
> or faster than the biological one should have much smaller measure, so
> that would not be an appealing transformation. OTOH an artificial brain
> could be designed to have larger measure, such as by being physically
> larger or perhaps by having more accurate and complete memory storage.
> Then that would be appealing.
>
> I think that one of the fundamental principles of your COMP hypothesis
> is the functionalist notion, that it does not matter what kind of system
> instantiates a computation. However I think this founders on the familiar
> paradoxes over what counts as an instantiation. In principle we can
> come up with a continuous range of devices which span the alternatives
> from non-instantiation to full instantiation of a given computation.
> Without some way to distinguish these, there is no meaning to the question
> of when a computation is instantiated; hence functionalism fails.
>
> My approach (not original to me) is to recognize that there is a degree
> of instantiation, as I have described via the conditional Kolmogorov
> measure (i.e. given a physical system, how much does it help a minimal
> computation to produce the desired output). This then leads very
> naturally to the analysis I provided in my previous message, which
> attempted to estimate the conditional K measure for the hypothetical
> first-person computations that were being potentially instantiated by
> the given third-party physical situation.
>
> Hal Finney
>
> >
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Received on Tue Jun 20 2006 - 21:16:44 PDT