[extropy-chat] was Re: ANNOUNCE: Extropy Institute's Future, but now tuned back to the usual program

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On May 5, 2006, at 4:01 AM, Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote:
> Why would synchronicity of the clock determine the process identity?
> Chips already in commercial use have section-local clocks (P4 ALU runs
> at twice the speed of the rest of the chip) and there's design for
> clockless chips.  Would a mind operating on those chips not be one  
> mind
> but a society of minds?


There is no meaningful reality to clock synchronicity, just a  
probabilistic presumption of synchronicity.  This notion is such a  
pain that engineers frequently pretend that this is not true when  
they can get away with it (as a matter of probability).  Latency  
bounds the complexity of problems that can be addressed in some  
amount of time with some probability of error.

It is by convention that we classify "minds" along the boundaries of  
communication bottlenecks.  There is nothing special about a  
particular arrangement that defines a mind beyond relatively low  
local latency.  The defining latency could be re-defined at will.   
Some networks today have higher bandwidth and lower latency than  
single computers in yesteryear, but we do not call the networks  
single computers, though we could by many old standards.


J. Andrew Rogers