Re: Subjective counterfactuals

From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Sat Apr 10 1999 - 13:21:31 MDT


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Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> on Sunday, April 04, 1999
wrote about lots of good thought experiments:

> Has the causal connection been broken or not?

I think some (not all) of your questions can be answered by having
a definition of causality that is consistent with our everyday use of
the term and yet produces few philosophical problems:

If event A causes event B that means two things and two things only:

1) If you find event A you are certain to find event B further along a
    sequence of events.

2) If you find event B you may or may not find event A
    in the opposite direction.

This asymmetry is useful, humans call one direction along the sequence of events
"The Future" and the other direction "The Past". I don't know why the sequence is
organized the way it is, I don't know why only one sequence seems to be real
and thus only 2 directions exist in time. I'm not even sure it's true
and there are only 2 directions in time.

Sometimes people feel there is a third property causality must have,
namely a story that connects A to B, however as this invariably brings in other
causal connections it obviously has no place in a fundamental definition.

I think most of the Turing machines you mention in your post would be
conscious despite the unconventional way they operate; it's not difficult
to extrapolate some bizarre and perhaps even disturbing conclusions
from there, but so be it. Anyway, that's the way this Turing machine sees it.

          John K Clark jonkc@att.net

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