From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jun 12 2002 - 07:03:39 MDT
John Clark writes
> >your comparison of an actual physical denouement (the torture
> >of a little girl) with a video recording of it is absurd
>
> Perhaps, but I'll bet Stephen Wolfram author of the just published
> book "A New Kind Of Science" would not say it's totally off the wall.
I emphasize that the actual torturous experience of the little
girl is computation. A sequence of states is calculated from
preceding states. (All of our experiences amount to this.)
So we must always strongly and emphatically distinguish between
real experiences and portrayals of people having experiences.
What does anything that Stephen Wolfram is writing about CAs
possibly have to do with this?
> > I assume that you would express **extreme** disapproval
> > of the events the *first* time that they occur.
>
> CERTAINLY!
Thanks. There are about 4 reasons we should reiterate this
from time to time.
> > It's possible that you should review the reasons that you
> > disapprove so much.
>
> Because that's the way my brain is wired.
Yes. But can you characterize your disapproval the way that
I do mine? I say "I disapprove of certain computations, those
that cause beings to undergo unnecessarily painful experiences."
My simple phrasing does not include qualifiers about what may
be happening simultaneously (in my reference frame) across the
galaxy somewhere, nor something that happened (past tense in
my reference frame) far away long ago. Utter care on your part
to describe what computations you disapprove of may reveal
inconsistencies in your view.
> > suppose that the re-enactment of the original torture
> > session is *almost* identical, except that one atom
> > in one of the eyelashes of the little girl is absent.
>
> And if I said it still made no difference you'd ask
> about 2 atoms then 3, 4,5,6...
No! Where did you ever get that idea?? ;-)
> In general how many trivial changes does it take to make a profound change
> in something? I know a 70 pound man is thin and a 700 pound man is fat but I
> can't tell you exactly where the dividing line is.
Suppose that you're a doctor who criticizes obesity in your
patients. Then your criticism will be proportional to the
weight excess. Does your approval here begin to change as
the similarity begins to diminish? That is, when enough
atoms in the little girl (other people besides John please
read "slight variations in the enacting program") are
different, your disapproval intensifies?
Note the obverse case: you STRONGLY DISAPPROVE of the proposed
torture of some innocent person (thanks again), but as the
proposed incident starts slightly to resemble earlier historical
tragedies, your disapproval begins to wane. Finally, when the
proposed torture session extremely closely resembles in part A
what happened to X long ago and in part B what happened to Y
long ago, your disapproval all but vanishes?
Lee
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:45 MST