From: John K Clark (johnkclark@fastmail.fm)
Date: Sun Feb 15 2009 - 10:40:49 MST
On Sun, 15 Feb 2009 "Krekoski Ross"
<rosskrekoski@gmail.com> said:
> It [arithmetic] is also highly goal oriented
> so the outcome converges on a single pattern.
But evolution must also have built our minds with one goal in mind,
survival. I concede that there is only one correct answer in arithmetic
and there is more than one way to survive; but there are VASTLY more
ways to die than to live, so our minds can’t be anyway near as sensitive
about trivial changes in initial conditions as the weather is. And by
the way, although weather is subject to chaos I very much doubt that
climate is.
I also think one of the most important things about intelligence is
knowing what to forget; this is true for us and will even be true of a
Jupiter Brain. If every little thing we observe were put into our very
fastest memory location (it wouldn’t hurt much if it were stored in the
equivalent of a cheap hard disk even if we’ll probably never look at it)
then our mind would get bogged down in minutiae.
> If we extend the metaphor of the identical room a bit however,
> and lets say we have two identical copies of a single individual,
> according to your criteria of identical-- with respect to their
> classical arrangement of molecules, but not identical to a
> quantum level. We put them in two separate but identical rooms,
> and ask them to draw random lines on a page for 10 hours.
> Will their lines be completely identical?
Nobody knows, but for my thought experiment to be valid they’d only have
to be the same right now, not for 10 hours. How long is now? About a
second, perhaps two. And I don’t think personal identity is an all or
nothing matter; if one of them drew a line that was 2% steeper than the
other I don’t think it would be proof they are completely separate
individuals.
John K Clark
-- John K Clark johnkclark@fastmail.fm -- http://www.fastmail.fm - IMAP accessible web-mail
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:04 MDT