[extropy-chat] Just curious, cryonicist living life in reverse

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Fri Mar 2 11:16:14 UTC 2007


Suppose there are two programs: program A is my life on 1st March 2007 and
program B is my life on 2nd March 2007. Granted, the programmer needs to
know all sorts of details about my past life before he can write the
programs, and in particular he has to know what is going into program A
before he can write program B, but we assume that he has done his job
properly. Now here I am, and it's the 2nd of March by my calendar, so it
must be program B that is running. I certainly remember yesterday as being
the 1st of March, but does this give me any information at all as to whether
program A was run yesterday, has not yet been run, is being run
simultaneously on a separate machine or process, or any details at all about
its implementation?

Stathis Papaioannou

On 3/2/07, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 09:23:13PM +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> >    Suppose all the moments of your life (your observer moments) could be
> >    seamlessly sliced up, so that their content remained the same but
> they
> >    could be shuffled like cards. This could actually happen if you were
>
> But you would have to run the computation, to compute the sequence
> of trajectory frames before you can start reshuffling anything.
>
> >    part of a computer simulation: the program could be stopped at any
> >    point, saved to memory, and restored at a later time or on another
> >    computer. The point is that you would have no way of knowing, without
>
> No problem, as long you have a last state to resume from, which
> continues the trajectory.
>
> >    being provided with external information, when or for how long your
> >    program was stopped, how fast the computer clock was running, whether
> >    the observer moments were being run in sequence, what machines your
>
> How can you compute things out of sequence? The nearest analogon is
> hash Life (building a hash table of recursive light cones, using the
> fact that conformation distribution is very far from random, which
> allows very large speedups, at least on older sequential), and I'm
> not at all sure what this cause to in-world embedded observers (Life
> is an all-purpose computer).
>
> If you're a process, and you do some fancy nonlinear things in
> the trajectory computation, even though the target state is the same,
> I'm not buying the first-person observation is ok.
>
> >    program was being run on, or indeed any details about the substrate
> of
> >    your implementation.
>
> --
> Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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