From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jan 13 1997 - 20:39:34 MST
Eliezer writes:
>So if 90% of it is comments, unused code, or padding, who cares? The
>amount of data needed to assemble a soul still has an upper limit
>smaller than my hard drive...
Considerably more data is needed to assemble a soul than the data in the
human genome. Remember that wolf boy in France? If you raise a child with
no access to outside data (no books, no human companionship), then the
result will, I bet, not have much of a soul. Of course, this must remain a
Gedankenexperiment for ethical reasons, and in this case I do not find the
ethical constraints chafing, but rather, quite reasonable.
-- Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pobox.com ++ http://www.pobox.com/~arkuat/
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