[extropy-chat] cryonicist living life in reverse

[Lee Corbin]

Stathis writes

> On 3/11/07, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:

> > How do you know that consciousness (and hence benefit over a life worth living)
> > isn't dependent on entropy increase?

> > Yes, I know that computations can be made reversible, but until a lot more is 
> > known about all this, I'll have my computations run in the forward direction
> > with entropy increase, thank you.

> The "real world" could run forwards while your mind runs backwards.

That is a good argument, at least under Boltzmann's view.  But that may be wrong.

> Imagine a virtual reality program is written with your entire life mapped out,
> broken up into intervals. Each subprogram thus created will contain memories
> of "past" intervals but not "future" intervals.

Oh, that's the old 1994 Greg Egan scenario in Permutation City.  Of course.

> The point is, if these programs were run forwards, backwards or all jumbled up,
> you would not be able to tell that anything unusual had happened from within
> the program. 

Of course, at least to outward observers.  You would report what ever you report.
It does not *necessarily* follow that you experience anything. Recall the horrible
GLUT (Giant Lookup Table) which performs no computations but reports vived
experiences.

I concede that it is *possible* that I would have experiencs under reversed
computations;  I dispute that it can be proven.

Lee