From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Mon Jun 10 2002 - 18:37:03 MDT
Lee writes:
> Hal writes
> > When I brought this up several years ago on Wei's mailing list which
> > discusses the possibility that all universes exist,
> > http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/everything.html, Wei proposed (as I recall)
> > that the thought experiment could be reconciled with notions of the value
> > of re-running by expanding these to value increases in size as well as
> > increases in frequency. So it would be twice as good either to run on
> > a computer twice as big, or to run twice as often (I'm not sure whether
> > twice as fast would also be twice as good).
>
> Well, I've never entertained the idea that the *size* of a computer
> has anything to do with "the amount of consciousness" it supports or
> anything like that, any more than I'd think experiences would be more
> intense if our neurons were bigger.
Right, well, I think that it does follow if you believe that multiple
instantiations make things more intense in some sense.
And on further thought about the speed issue, I am convinced that,
unbelievable as it may seem, it is better by this logic to run slower
than faster! Running your program N times slower is essentially
equivalent to running it repeated N times.
Suppose your life goes through states ABCDE. Then you could run it,
say, 3 times over: ABCDEABCDEABCDE. Now you could look at these runs
as being interleaved:
A B C D E
A B C D E
A B C D E
and they collapse to:
AAABBBCCCDDDEEE
(Maybe you could think of this as being a time sharing computer which swaps
out one run and swaps in the next, only the swaps end up being no-ops
except during state transitions.)
In the 3 times slower version you can think of the first B as being
caused by the first A, the second B as being caused by the second A, and
so on. So you can still see it as 3 repetitions, all being interleaved.
It's equivalent.
Going back to the spatial issue, you could have 3 computers running your
program:
ABCDE
ABCDE
ABCDE
Or you can think of this as a single 3-times bigger computer, going
ABCDE. It's just a question of looking at it by rows or columns.
The bottom line is, redundancy is redundancy. You can be N times bigger,
N times slower, or N times repeated. Either way you have each state
occupying N times more of spacetime than in the singular case.
I know I am not exactly providing air-tight arguments for these points, but
my intuition is very strong that they are all equivalent. I can try
to come up with better arguments later.
An amazing implication of this perspective is that uploading would be a
bad thing! Putting yourself onto a computer that ran 1000 times faster
would be like killing yourself to a 99.9% degree; likewise if the circuit
elements were smaller so that your brain ran on a sugar cube computer.
I wonder if someone who believes in the virtue of redundancy and who
comes to accept the equivalence of these various ways of being redundant
would refuse to accept uploading. It would be like having 1000 identical
copies of yourself running and getting all but 1 of them instantly killed.
Hal
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