X-Message-Number: 8073
Date:  Mon, 14 Apr 97 11:57:58 
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: CRYONICS Information Paradigm

Bob Ettinger,  #8061, wrote:

>As I understand it, the Information Paradigm people say something like
>this:
>
>"We agree that a simulation of water is not wet, a simulation of a
>flame is not hot, and so on. But if a person is simulated in a
>corresponding manner, then a simulated person will perceive the
>simulated water as wet and the simulated flame as hot; and if
>simulated water is poured (by simulation) on a simulated flame, the
>simulated flame will go out (by simulation); and so on. Simulated life
>can be as full and real as our own." 
>
I (an "Information Paradigm" person) would accept this. As for the 
difference between simulation and emulation, an emulation is a 
"perfect" simulation--i.e. it captures all the meaningful detail of 
the original. (We still have to decide what is "all the meaningful 
detail," but this is the idea.)

> Or--if I had the time and resources--I could
>simply WRITE DOWN in longhand, on a zillion reams of paper, a complete
>description/prediction of you and your actions over a certain period
>of time in a certain environment, all of your quantum states and
>transitions.

This might be an emulation. We right now might be in such an 
emulation, carried out by some advanced being or machinery. This
really might BE us right now. However, the "writing down"--if
I understand correctly, would be an ongoing process, not
something done once and all, for eternity. That difference is
significant.

>After all, if mere
>information is all you deem important, why bother even to write it
>down?

Information is not all I deem important. That's only one of two 
major parts. (If information was all I cared about, I'd be happy with 
Professor Jameson's solution to the problem of death--that is, to 
just be perfectly preserved but never awaken. No, I want reanimation 
too!) Information is necessary, I maintain, for the *conservation* of 
identity. That's why we are cryonicists. We are trying to preserve 
our information--to conserve our identity. But that alone is not
what we want. In addition, we seek *expression*
of our identity, which involves the *use* of the information
in some form of active process--a process we call living. Up to
now this process has had a pretty 
definite, restrictive form in terms of our biology. In the future it 
may and probably will take on much different forms. However it will 
still be an ongoing process, not just the static storage of an 
unchanging record.

> You cannot FULLY emulate anything unless/until you know EVERYTHING
>there is to know about it (or at least everything you need to know).
>For example, we cannot fully emulate quantum phenomena because we do
>not fully understand them; likewise gravitation; likewise the
>"passage" of time. Since there are wide gaps in our knowledge of
>ourselves and this universe, how could we possibly do any broad
>emulations in a virtual universe? The virtual universe would
>necessarily reflect (at least) all of the deficiencies in our
>knowledge of the original.

There is a heck of a lot we don't know now about any particular 
system we observe, including the visible universe. According to 
theory, though (if you accept such arguments as Tipler's), it's all 
captured in the quantum state, which is finitely describable (again, 
for systems bounded in spatial extent and energy content, but not for 
every conceivable system). The state transitions, moreover, follow
known rules. So, in principle, an emulation of a sizable chunk of
history of our universe, including all life on earth from day 1 to a
billion years from now, appears to be possible. The practical
significance of this is tiny, of course, but it has philosophical
interest in telling us something about the nature of ourselves and
our existence. 

>Even if you knew everything, it seems impossible that you could get
>a genuine ONE-TO-ONE isomorphism between the original and the
>emulation. By one-to-one I mean that for EVERY feature in the original
>there is exactly one feature in the emulation, and nothing extra; and
>vice-versa. 
>
>For example, a Turing tape cannot be an emulation for many reasons,
>including the fact that on the tape setup only one thing can happen at
>a time, while in the world many things happen simultaneously.

I don't think this would preclude a Turing machine "simulation" being 
an emulation. Why? Because the TM could emulate "instants of time." 
In the TM world an (emulated) instant would not be an instant, i.e. 
it would take more than one time step to emulate a time step. 
Similarly, the TM could emulate spatial configurations without having 
to preserve the exact geometry or contiguity of the original regions, so 
long as processing in the emulation could be translated into 
corresponding processing in the original and vice versa. In this way,
for instance, a TM on a 1-dimensional tape could emulate a TM on a
2-dimensional tape (more slowly
of course, but with every move accounted for in full). Similarly, I
could imagine a TM emulating processes that proceed by
quantum state transitions, i.e. events in our world.

>Now ask yourself, what kind of physical system could emulate a carbon
>atom? Remember, we want ALL the features of a carbon atom, and nothing
>extra; and we want the same economy of space and time as in the
>original. (That last requirement might, at first thought, be modified
>by allowing scale-up; but you can't scale up quantum effects, so
>forget it.) It seems to me "virtually" certain it can't be done. There
>is no substitute for carbon...and very possibly, if you want a self
>circuit,  there is no substitute for meat.

I wouldn't be as stringent as you. If a suitable translator between 
the simulated world and mine existed, I would accept the simulation
as a true emulation. If I could communicate with an emulated person,
see their picture, hear their voice, etc. etc.--I would accept that
person as real. This would not require that they run in realtime. 
They might run much more slowly, for example, and at a rate that 
decreased with time--so long as a long enough wait produced desired 
results. (By the same token they could run much faster and at an 
accelerating rate--they would have to "hold horses" for me.)
One thought in all this is that to an emulated person events 
would seem to proceed at the normal rate and otherwise be perfectly 
ordinary (excepting possible communication with the outside). 
That's a major reason I would accept the emulated world as 
a real world--once again, we could be in such a world right now and 
not know it. If I find that out someday, I'm not going to start 
thinking of myself and others as "unreal." 

Mike Perry

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