From: John K Clark (johnkclark@fastmail.fm)
Date: Thu Feb 12 2009 - 22:18:20 MST
Me:
>> If you and the original were facing each other an equal distance from
>> the center of a symmetrical room then you two would be receiving
>> identical input and thus act identically; and if I switched your
>> position no outside observer could tell the difference objectively, and
>> you couldn't tell the difference subjectively. So I conclude it makes no
>> difference.
"Stuart Armstrong" <dragondreaming@googlemail.com> said:
> The fact that it's not true (viz classical chaos or quantum
> decoherence)
Chaos is an interesting phenomenon but it does no apply to all complex
things; generally small changes in starting conditions change one pseudo
random pattern into a very different pseudo random pattern. It is much
less a factor if logic is involved and probably intelligence in general.
For example, calculating the first million digits of Pi is quite
complex, and if just one digit in the sequence is wrong subsequent
digits will be wrong too, but 2 computers will almost always produce the
exact same sequence even if they operated at slightly different
temperatures or even if they were made by different manufactures. It’s
hard to believe that if a nat farted in your third grade classroom you
would have a different political philosophy today; I think it would take
a very long time for chaos alone to make minds diverge.
And if you insist that for you to survive every atom in your body must
be identical down to the quantum level and every particle in those atoms
be entangled in just the same way then you die and a new being is born
about a million times a nanosecond. That really doesn’t seem like a
fruitful way to look at the
matter to me.
John K Clark
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