From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Wed Jun 12 2002 - 09:52:19 MDT
A minor variant on Lee's experiment is to have the *first* simulation
halt if you push the button, but not the second simulation (he had it
vice versa). Presumably the same sort of considerations arise.
If a simulation were merely temporarily suspended when the button
was pushed, and later resumed, then I think most of us involved in
this discussion agree that this change would not be detectable by the
consciousness involved, and that this would not be harmful to him.
So we can think of stopping the first sim on button-push, then running
a second sim from scratch up to the point of the button-push, and
momentarily pausing it. Now we're about to resume it. The question
is, is this a resumption of the suspended first sim, or a resumption
of the suspended second sim?
I claim that either answer is equally good. If we accept that resuming
later from the suspension point could be thought of as a continuation of
the first sim, then that should be true even when the suspension point
was actually based on stored data from the second sim. The stored data
has no memory of where it came from.
So the question is meaningless. In general, you can't speak of a
resumption as being associated with a specific earlier run of a program.
To me, this casts doubt on the intuitive sense that there is "one person"
associated with the first run, and "another person" associated with the
second run, with the first person getting snuffed out when he pushes
the button while the second person continues to run. That model just
doesn't work.
Instead, there is at best ambiguity about which person it is who continues
to run. (In fact, John Clark goes so far as to deny that there are
two people involved, and I agree that this is questionable.)
We can even look at the cycle-to-cycle progress of the programs even when
no macroscopic suspension is involved, and question whether it makes
sense to associate one person with one run and a second person with
the other run. Between each cycle there is a microscopic suspension,
which based on the argument above means that we could with equal validity
assume that the two runs swap identities every cycle. That's a pretty
absurd view of the behavior of identies (by which I mean people from
the first-person view), again calling into question the validity and
usefulness of the one-person-per-run model.
Hal
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