From: John K Clark (johnkclark@fastmail.fm)
Date: Fri Mar 06 2009 - 09:15:05 MST
On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 "Matt Mahoney"
<matmahoney@yahoo.com> said:
> if you try to draw a line […]
In the real world one never draws a line, you draw a blob.
> one person posted that they believed that if they
> were killed instantly during teleportation then they
> would become the copy but not if they were killed 5 minutes later.
I believe that was me.
> OK, what about 1 minute? At exactly what
> femtosecond boundary is the critical point?
I also said that I wouldn’t be comfortable with the procedure unless the
copy was made right now, and “now” is the time it takes to complete a
thought, about a second, maybe two. I made no claim that this tells us
anything profound about the universe, it’s just my personal preference.
I personally don’t like the idea of having a last thought, but you may
feel differently about it. There is no disputing matters of taste.
> if a newly fertilized egg is not conscious, what
> about a 3 month old embryo? If an ant is not conscious,
> what about a dog?
A 90 pound man is thin, a 900 pound man is fat, but you can not point to
a precise ounce and say this is where a thin man becomes fat.
> I can always construct a continuum between these cases.
And I can make a continuum between jet black and blinding white, does
that mean there is no difference between black a white?
> what about a program that also passes the
> Turing test? By a process of binary search
What about it?
John K Clark
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John K Clark
johnkclark@fastmail.fm
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