[ExI] Is a copy of you really you?

[Dave Sill]

On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 5:14 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I was thinking mainly of genes.
>
> I wonder if computers hiccup.  There is a thing that happens in our brains
> called 'involuntary rest pauses'.  You can test yourself:  just tap a
> finger on some surface and keep it up.  Sooner or later you will lose the
> rhythm and miss a tap.  Extroverts miss more than introverts.
>
> So if computers have IRPs (Could there be small changes in electricity
> that accounts for errors?)
> , then a copied code will be short of perfect.  Does this happen this way?
> Given enough length of the program I am guessing that errors will happen.
> Then you have a bug, I suppose, which you have to fix.
>

Computers can have all kinds of glitches: hardware problems, software
problems, power problems, etc. Almost all have at least parity memory,
meaning that errors will be detected. Most servers have error-correcting
memory, which means that most errors will be automatically fixed. At any
rate, it's trivial to compare the original and the copy to detect any
mistakes.

-Dave
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