X-Message-Number: 14962
From: 
Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2000 21:45:13 EST
Subject: whatever-wherever-whenever man

WHATEVER-WHEREVER-WHENEVER MAN

Here's some more waste of time, but what the hey. It's amusing to a few of 
us, and some day it might even be important. (That day could even be today, 
if it gives pause to someone who might stall on cryonics out of hopes for 
uploading.)

Uploaders think it doesn't matter what you are made of (states in computer 
memory will do just fine), or where you are (duplicates elsewhere share your 
identity), or whether there are discontinuities in time (an emulation in the 
distant future or past would also be you). So let's take another slightly 
different look at where these suppositions lead.

Let's first ease off some of the pressure on the uploaders, and not insist 
that isomorphism is good enough for time as well as matter and space. Let 
them require just correspondences in patterns of information, and allow them 
to specify an evolution of these patterns over time, corresponding to the 
emulated segment of person/environment/history. In other words, "you" at a 
given moment are just a set of symbols corresponding to a quantum state of 
your body or brain or part thereof, but you don't "live" unless there is a 
logical succession of these quantum states over time, reflecting physical 
causality in the meat.

Of course, this succession need not be the ordinary kind. It could be speeded 
up, or slowed down, or have gaps in it from an outside perspective. 
(Remember, for example, that in a Turing computer almost all of its time and 
resources are spent on intermediate calculations and operations, so that most 
of the time nothing is happening on a subjective level, the last fully 
specified quantum state remaining unchanged.) If the uploader doesn't allow 
that, his argument falls apart completely. Now it gets interesting (unless 
your eyes have already glazed over). 

The physical nature of the "computer" doesn't matter, nor does its algorithm, 
so long as it produces the necessary result--a succession of sets of symbols 
corresponding to successive quantum states of the person. The "computer" 
could be distributed! One part of it would not have to "know" what another 
part was doing! As long as--somehow, somewhere--appropriate sets of symbols 
appear, in the right order, "you" live!

Well, remember the sculptor? "Inside every slab of marble there is a 
beautiful sculpture. All the sculptor has to do is remove the covering." And 
all the observer of emulation has to do is recognize those parts of the 
universe where some set of atoms (or whatever) are arranged in an order that 
could be interpreted as constituting the right symbols; and a chronon later, 
somewhere else, he perceives an arrangement that could be interpreted as a 
succeeding quantum state. 

Of course, if the locales shift around too much, the "subject" might get a 
little dizzy, but drastic shifts in locale probably wouldn't be necessary. 
The set of possible interpretations is simply too vast, even in a very small 
volume of space.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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