From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Nov 20 1998 - 14:43:21 MST
John Clark wrote:
>
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky Wrote:
>
> >How would you define "identity"?
>
> I think we'd need to start with the word "identical". It two things can be
> exchanged and no change can be detected by the outside world then the two
> things are identical. An unproved and unprovable but nevertheless reasonable
> corollary is that it doesn't matter internally either.
I am not getting into this. We already did this discussion two years ago.
Besides, Turing identity is totally irrelevant to the issue of whether a given
Turing process should be considered a singleton or a community, and you know it.
No offense. But if there's any AI-literate being on the planet who doesn't
have strong, unarguable opinions on Strong AI, I would like to meet him.
As for myself, of course, I have always held that the laws of physics are
non-Turing-computable and there is no observer-independent answer to the
general form of the question "Does process A instantiate computation B"?
Likewise, you are a strong computationalist: Everything is Turing-computable
and the phrase "non-Turing-computable" is synonymous with ghosties and
ghoulies. The chance that either of us will change opinions without totally
new arguments equals the probability that we will both become fanatic Calvinists.
Why bother?
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/sing_analysis.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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