From: Stathis Papaioannou (stathisp@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Mar 09 2008 - 01:01:35 MST
On 09/03/2008, Lee Corbin <lcorbin@rawbw.com> wrote:
> > If the programmer saves the end of Monday on a USB key, walks over to
> > the computer a few metres away, loads the data and starts up Tuesday,
> > is there still a loss of consciousness?
>
>
> No. No loss of consciousness. Good question, I think, because
> the incredibly tiny loss of consciousness I was talking about
> occurred because some state was uncomputed from any previous
> state. That is, is in some faraway place all the Tuesday computations
> begin, and the first Tuesday state arose by chance (or from some
> irrelevant backup), then one iota of consciousness was lost.
I don't see how what you suggest is possible. A computer, or a brain,
is a finite state machine. We might note that Monday = {Si...Sj} and
Tuesday = {Sm...Sn}, i.e. a discrete number of states covering each of
the days. Where is the extra information that allows the observer's
experience to differ depending on whether the computations are
causally connected?
-- Stathis Papaioannou
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