From: Mike Dougherty (msd001@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Mar 13 2008 - 19:50:18 MDT
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 10:51 AM, Lee Corbin <lcorbin@rawbw.com> wrote:
> Please excuse the top posting, but I agree with all the points that
> Mike appears to be making.
>
> As for all the questions near the end of the post, they're interesting,
> but I don't see how any of the basic issues we're discussing hinges
> on any of them.
>
> Please feel free to ask any again of them that are real (and not
> rhetorical) questions, and which vitally address whether memory
> merging is possible for close duplicats. It is reassuring :-) that
> you find memory merging of close duplicates (our subject line)
> even less problematical than I do. And you gave good examples
> of it IMO.
>
Thanks for the encouragement. Hinges on = no => agreed.
I find it difficult to phrase my thoughts in words because I tend to think
more in pictures and analogy.
To give a more concrete (real & not rhetorical) example:
Today on my way home I took a slightly different path than usual, yet after
some meandering I found myself on a familiar road and continued from that
point along my usual route. Suppose I make similar (yet each unique) small
detours each day for a week. After the experiment you ask, "How did you get
from work to home?" but you do not provide the specific context of a
particular day, or a particular travel method. When I think of all the
routes I had used, they are a superposition of valid solutions- and they're
all correct solutions within the scope of the question.
If you ask the same question to both me and my wife, then I might think
also of those routes she used to travel from her work to our home. I did
not subjectively experience those routes in real-time detail, but I am still
capable of imagining them as solutions to the intentionally open-scoped
question. I don't think these 'imagined' routes are difficult to include
within the sphere of possibility for how I did (or might have) get from work
to home. There might have been a route enter my mind's view of possible
routes that I had taken months before I started this experiment. I believe
that experience may or may not have happened (a third-party might have told
me how to imagine it) but it is still worth some possibility of correctly
answering the question.
The analogy works here because the question itself does not limited by
time - so each of those serialized events are presented simultaneously as
possible answers. I believe subjective experience of run-time in a
computation environment where the observation of time can be manipulated by
an external agent provides for a context switch, several processing threads
each deposit results into shared "memory" and a context switch back will
appear to those inhabiting the suspended environment that the results of
those independent threads have been computed instantly.
I have some proficiency with SQL as a visualization for structured
information / thoughts. Recent discussion of GLUT makes me think of
database concepts. Given that database theory is essentially a scaled down
version of set theory, would it be acceptable to represent (for discussion)
these ideas in set theory terms? (I admit to not having the rigid formalism
of Set Theory available as a natural language, but might it be worth the
effort? Is that too domain-specific to have anyone make the effort?)
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