From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sun Jun 09 2002 - 20:21:19 MDT
Lee Corbin writes:
> (Also I'm tickled
> pink that people are coming to understand that re-running someone's
> life is not a no-op. It should matter to you whether or not two
> completely identical runs of your life occur, or only one! Yay.)
I'm not sure about people "coming to understand" this; I know Wei has
explored these ideas quite intensely for several years.
I once constructed a thought experiment which to me casts doubt on the
notion that re-running a life is beneficial. More specifically it looks
at the issue of running the same program on two computers at the same
time, which arguably should as valuable as running it at two different
times. Then I try to arrange things so that we have the computers hooked
up so that they can run as either a single computer or as two separate
computers, with the hookup such that they can be varied smoothly between
the two states. I describe one version of the experiment here:
http://www.extropy.org/exi-lists/extropians.3Q98/0753.html
The real conclusion of the thought experiment, it seems to me, is that
there is no well defined notion of the number of implementations of a
program, and hence of the number of conscious observers. Therefore we
can't say that it is good to be re-run, since that is fundamentally a
meaningless concept - there is no well-defined notion of how many runs
a program gets.
When I brought this up several years ago on Wei's mailing list which
discusses the possibility that all universes exist,
http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/everything.html, Wei proposed (as I recall)
that the thought experiment could be reconciled with notions of the value
of re-running by expanding these to value increases in size as well as
increases in frequency. So it would be twice as good either to run on
a computer twice as big, or to run twice as often (I'm not sure whether
twice as fast would also be twice as good).
That is certainly an interesting proposal, and I wish that everyone who
advocates the value of re-running would also bite the bullet and advocate
the value of running on big computers. Either way you get more of the
universe's resources dedicated to running your program, which I think
ultimately is what is being sought by those who hold this value system.
Hal
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