From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@rawbw.com)
Date: Tue Mar 11 2008 - 09:14:18 MDT
Recap for those who're reading this afresh.
State-j is the last state of Monday, and State-m is the
first state of Tuesday, where Monday is a 24hr computer
emulation of a person and Tuesday is the 24hr continuation
of that person. We expect it to be subjectively identical to
the emulatee to a 48hr run of the same program.:
What is at issue is how different is this situation from a
48 hour computer run that begins at a state Sa and
proceeds all the way to the end of Tuesday, state Sz,
if we mess in interesting ways with the last state of
Monday and the first statet of Tuesday.
Sj is the last state of Monday and the first state of Tuesday
is Sm (Stathis probably very farsightedly left some letters
between those two states "just in case". The computations inside
the Monday computer go from Sa->Sb->...->Sj and are a
perfect simulation. Likewise the computations inside the Tuesday
computer go Sm->Sn->...->Sz. (Sorry for a typo in my previous
post, where I erroneously referred to a Sk = State-k.)
Ordinarily on a normal computer Sj would give rise to Sm by the
laws of physics or their in-computer equivalent, but we're
exploring slightly different variations on how (or whether) Sm
actually starts first thing Tuesday, or whether Sj is copied from
the end of Monday and planted on the Tuesday computer as
one little precursor to get things rolling just like the 48 hr run.
Stathis writes
> What I had in mind was that Sj is used as input to produce its
> successor Sm, from which the rest of Tuesday follows
> deterministically. If Sj is reliably transferred from the first to the
> second computer that would be the same as if the computation
> unfolded in the one intact machine, no?
Right.
> But if the transfer were unreliable it would only be by chance
> that the "right" sequence of states was set into motion giving
> rise to the Tuesday experience.
Yes. To me, that's as if we perfectly emulate a person's 48hr
life quite a few times without incident. Then in some run of that
single computer a God-particle level cosmic ray strikes at
midnight on Monday, and the rest of the computation takes
off in an entirely random and different direction, probably no
longer emulating the same person at all
To you, is that equivalent also?
Lee
P.S.
>> What is the appeal to you and Schmidhuber and the rest of
>> the gang to all that dust comprising 0.99999999999 of your
>> experience? That would seem to me to induce fatalism.
>
> Determinism, yes. Is that the same as fatalism?
No, I mean something like this: Suppose that I hear that an
extremely large asteroid by sheer luck is barreling down on
the Earth at thousands of kilometers per second. I see this
as a big, big hit on my runtime. (We're all going to die.)
Why, in the Tegmark example, there is no other Lee Corbin
for about 10^10^29 lightyears from here. So for me personally,
not to mention all the people I love, this (to me) is very bad
news.
How is it for you? If 0.99999999999 of you (say in the
visible universe 10^42 ly across), is unaffected by the asteroid,
why worry?
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