<div dir="auto"><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 11:46 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On 19/03/2026 11:15, Jason Resch wrote:<br>
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 6:06 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br>
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> On 18/03/2026 04:03, Jason Resch wrote:<br>
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> Ben wrote:<br>
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> If you claim that there is nothing special or unique about any particular individual mind, you also have to claim that there is nothing special or unique about any particular piece of music, any particular mathematical equation or any other particular pattern of information. That line of thinking leads to the conclusion that all information is the same thing. Not a particularly useful viewpoint.<br>
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> I think you misread what I was saying. I was not saying there's nothing unique or special about any mind, I was saying there's nothing unique or special about a mind in the sense of it being a "privileged I". This is because every mind, from its own perspective, feels it is privileged in this way, just as contemporaries in every point in time, consider their "now" to be the special (only existing) point in time.<br>
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> But the more scientifically valid "block time" view of the universe dissolves the idea of a privileged now, just as open individualism dissolves the notion of a privileged I.<br>
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I think the language here is getting a bit too complex, making it difficult to follow (I think you are contradicting yourself above, but I'm sure you don't think so, so some clarification is needed).<br>
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Can we say that each mind is a specific information pattern (which is a shorthand for 'a dynamic information pattern with certain characteristics, some of which we aren't yet sure of'), and that of course there are many things that different minds have in common?<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I don't think we can. If the mind is a dynamic information pattern, then it is constantly changing, and so there is no way to pin it on being any specific set of information. This is especially true when you consider different possible branching paths that may follow from one original state of the mind at one particular point in time.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">For example, if you assume many worlds: across all the branches where you diverged a year ago, your mind has entered a vast number of distinct states, yet they all shared a common point of origination a year ago.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I think what we could say is that a single observer-moment could be identified with a particular computational-state. But once time and change are introduced, there's no single objective description we could give that includes all the infinite ways a mind may evolve from that point.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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And there will be some things that some minds have in common, and some things that all (known) minds have in common. Probably.<br>
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You claim that all minds of interest have 'subjective experience' in common. I agree (it's a bit of a tautology, really).<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Yes, but more specifically, all subjective experiences are experienced in a way that feels immediate and direct. This is what makes all experiences had by any mind feel like "they are mine."</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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You seem to claim that this means that all minds are therefore the same (?). </blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">No I am not saying they are all the same. I am saying they all have what is needed to feel as though they "are mine."</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I disagree.<br>
Apart from the obvious logical fallacy (If all chairs have legs, that doesn't mean that all chairs are the same), there's the tricky problem that we can't, even in principle, measure subjective experience, or compare it between different minds, so the statement "all minds have subjective experience" contains very little information, almost none, I'd say. Can we even define the term? It could be something entirely different for every different person, we'd never know.<br>
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I'd agree with "all minds (of interest) have some things in common", as that's quite obvious. All human minds have a ton of things in common, but they are all still separate minds (I'm going to stop saying 'unique', because that probably won't be true in the future (at least momentarily, in the scenario of duplicating mind-states).<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I think we agree broadly about this, but that you may still be missing my point here. Think about the question: "Of all the beings that exist in the universe, how do you know which one is you?"</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">You don't decide who you are by checking the name on the ID card in your wallet. Instead you use the simple fact: "I am the one having the direct, immediate experiences of being Ben Z."</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">In other words you rely on this feature of the subjective experiences you have access to, to decide which person (out of all the people in the universe) you happen to be.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But next: consider that this feature of experience (feeling like it is mine, because it is direct and immediate) is a feature of every experience has by ever conscious being.</div><div dir="auto"></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">So this method of deciding who it is you are, is flawed. This is the point I am making.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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I don't see any significance in your 'privileged I'. In fact, I'm not sure what it actually means. It would seem to mean that each person has a first-person perspective. But that's so obvious and trivial that I can't see it being a useful thing to note.</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">It is trivial, but the point is when we think about how we use this trivial property to try to uniquely identify "which person I am" we can then see how it is erroneous to use this fact to pick out one unique person in the universe.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> And it certainly doesn't follow from that, that everyone is really the same person (if that isn't a caricature of your position. I don't /think/ it is, from what you say).<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I am saying something a bit different than "we are all one" (which is ambiguous and mystical sounding). What I am saying is rather "all experiences are mine" because they all have what is required for any experience to be mine: they all feel as if they are mine.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">By this I am not saying all experiences are "Jason R.'s" or all experiences are "Ben Z.'s", I am saying all experiences have the properties required to make them mine -- every experience is felt as if it is happening to me (in a first person, direct, and immediate way).</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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> >> My suspicion is that as long as you get the detailed connectome right (plus things like the type of neurons), this will establish 'attractor states' that are fairly tolerant to minor differences, so inaccuracies in things like connection strengths will not be so important, and maybe you would wake up feeling a bit strange, but that would soon fade as things settle down to their normal states. But that's just speculation, really. Or maybe wishful thinking, but I'd guess that uploading could actually turn out to be a lot easier than we think, given a certain level of technology (mainly for the scanning, I'm pretty confident that that will always be the hardest thing).<br>
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> > I think there is possibly one extra step you could take, one final dualism to dispense with, which is the idea that you are defined by a particular/exact information pattern.<br>
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> That's not dualism, that is the exact opposite of dualism.<br>
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> My whole point is that each mind does consist of a particular, exact information pattern, and nothing else. That this is what a 'soul' (if you should insist on using the word) actually is, that this is the only thing that a mind can be.<br>
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> But you said you could survive as an imprecise upload (giving the fruit fly as an example). For this to be true, a person must be more than an "exact information pattern." You've already loosened that definition to an approximate information pattern.<br>
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> If one steps into a teletransporter, and emerges on the other side having lost a single long term memory that they hadn't recalled in the past 10 years, is such a memory loss fatal to that transported persons subjective survival? I think not, but am curious to know what you think.<br>
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> Then repeat the consideration with more and more memories being lost in the process. At what point do these changes flip from the person surviving to the person dying?<br>
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We can quibble about what 'precise' means, but the fact is we just don't yet know what level of precision will be necessary for an accurate upload of someone's mind (I was just speculating about the 'attractor state' thing). There will probably be a spectrum, and some kind of consensus will emerge about just how 'precise' the information needs to be.<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If there is any wiggle room, then a person's survival can't be tied to a specific information pattern. The concept of "you" then necessarily dissolves into a spectrum that ultimately includes everyone.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Here is a good description of the continuum of persons: <a href="http://frombob.to/you/aconvers.html">http://frombob.to/you/aconvers.html</a></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">"And we can take this even further. It can be shown that there exist an infinite number of universes that each contain almost Everyone!</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">You see, The Object contains the Continuum of Souls. It is a connected set, with a frothy, fractal structure, of rather high dimensionality. The Continuum contains an infinite number of Souls, all Souls in fact, and an infinite number of them are You. Or at least, close enough to being You so that nobody could tell the difference. Not even You.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">And the Continuum also contains an infinite number of souls that are almost You. And an infinite number that are sort of You. And because it is a Continuum, and because there is really no objective way to tell which one is really You, then any method one uses to try to distinguish between You and non-You will produce nothing but illusion. In a sense, there is only one You, and it is Everyone.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Of course, You can tell which one is you, can’t you? Or can you?"</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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I don't think the example of 'losing a single long-term memory' is very realistic, given the nature of memories and the way we store them, but you are again asking questions that we don't have any answer to yet.</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But for the purposes of the thought experiment we can imagine the possibility of such a thing.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If you take a long train ride, you emerge on the other end having gained or lost some memories. Few consider train rides lethal. Yet many might consider a faulty upload or teletransporter that performed the same modification to be fatal. Is this consistent?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If not, then my point is perfect identity of memory isn't necessary to survival.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Once we start trying to upload human minds, we will doubtless find out. I don't think there is any 'flip from surviving to dying', any more than there is a hard line between a biological creature living and dying.<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I don't think empirical results will help at all in settling this question objectively, as I explain in my paper.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Instead , you will with need to volunteer to undergo a faulty upload yourself to find out if you survive, or you will need to use some logic or reason (i.e. philosophy) to settle the question.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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Have you read Greg Bear's 'The Way' stories?</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I haven't. But thank you for the reference. I will check these out!</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> There's a character in there known as 'the architect', that pretty much sums up these questions, as he is dead (murdered, if I recall correctly), then 're-assembled' from data and memories taken from different sources, because certain parties needed his knowledge and skills. There's some debate as to what degree this re-constituted person is 'really' the architect, because he is definitely missing some parts of his original mind. There's no definite answer to the question, and I don't think there can be.<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I think there can be. Personalities or memories may be measurably different, but even if say, only 50% or only 20% of the original memories are survive, that surviving person still feels 100% to be alive and conscious and experiencing something. I don't know how it can make sense for someone to feel only 20% alive. I just heard a story today about a kid who had a stroke and a had to relearn how to walk and talk, and lost most of his memories and had significant personality changes. Yet something in him survived, despite these losses. It's not a loss anyone wants to undergo, but there is still a subject in that mind who is continuing to have experiences.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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> > Certainly, throughout our lives, the information pattern we identify with<br>
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> No, I have to stop you there. This is dualistic thinking. Or at least language that reinforces dualistic thinking. Who is the 'we' you refer to, if you are separating it from the information pattern? It would be better to say "the information patterns that we consist of"<br>
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> Okay you can use that wording. The patterns one consists of change drastically throughout one's life.<br>
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> > changes drastically. Are there any limits to how much that conscious pattern could change before it ceases being an "I"<br>
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> I hope that this question now answers itself.<br>
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> It answers it for me, but I am still not sure if our answers are aligned.<br>
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> Unless you are asking how simple can a mind be, which we don't currently know the answer to.<br>
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> No, I am asking what must be preserved in the pattern for survival (e.g. of an upload process). If you said it must be 100% identical, then I am afraid perfect uploading will never be realized. If you said some good enough approximation is all that is needed, then we can in theory survive an upload, but then you have broken the need for perfect identity of an information pattern. This raises the question: just what exactly is required to subjectively survive.<br>
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> You abandoned the notion that a specific group of atoms was necessary to survival.<br>
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> Now I ask to take the next step, which is to abandon the notion that a specific pattern of information is necessary to survival.<br>
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> Certainly getting the pattern close is important for preserving what is important to each of us: one's memories, personality, and goals. But my argument is it is of absolutely no importance when it comes to the question of subjective survival. The person who emerges on the other side of the upload will consider themselves to have survived the process even if they lose memories in the process.<br>
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I suppose that depends. We can imagine that someone missing significant chunks of memory would be aware of it, and feel that they are incomplete in some sense. If they lost most of their memories, would they be a different person?</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">In that sense, we are each a different person from every moment to the next, but the question I want to focus on is whether there is any notion of survival from one moment to the next.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> I don't know the answer to that. I don't think anyone does.</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">This is the point of my write up. There are reasons we can expect certain answers to these questions, and moreover we don't need to do any empirical experiments to get them (in fact, such experiments will only give the illusion of answers to these questions).</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> There will be certain features of the information pattern that are essential to having a conscious mind at all, of course, but between that and an 'exact' replica, there will be a large grey area, I expect. But there won't be a clear line, on one side of which you are 'the same person', and on the other side of which you are 'a new person'.<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I think you are already half way to open-individualism. If specific atoms don't matter for survival, and if specific patterns don't matter for survival, what does?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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I don't think you can reasonably say it's of 'absolutely no importance' though.</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Note that I said it was of absolutely no importance when it comes to the question of subjective survival, not that that it was of no importance generally. I acknowledged the importance of wanting to preserve knew memories, personalities and goals.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> I doubt you would be happy to undergo uploading if you knew that it would remove or substantially change your memories, personality, and goals. </blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Of course, and I said as much.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But even if the upload failed in this way, I would still find myself as a being that considered himself alive and conscious, and thus to have survived, despite my amnesia.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I certainly wouldn't be, and I'd be asking what the hell kind of uploading is that? It reads like the kind of personality reprogramming that criminals undergo in some SF stories, in order to turn them into 'model citizens' (or the kind of thing that would have the chinese communist party rubbing their hands in glee!).<br>
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Someone with some kinds of brain damage can change their personality, or lose important parts of their memories. Are they still the same person?</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">The question of "same person" is too ambiguous. And it isn't what I am asking. Instead I ask: can someone *survive* amnesia?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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But all this doesn't matter. We will obviously do our best to replicate as closely as we can, within the limits that animal experiments establish, the original mind.</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">It matters for those who currently think:</div><div dir="auto">"If it isn't exact, then I won't survive, so why bother freezing my brain?"</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">What do you say to such people?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> I don't really see the point of all this talk of incomplete uploads, missing memories etc., when we will do what we can to avoid them. I'm sure that after we have perfected uploading to some degree, we will want to investigate these issues, but it's just not relevant now. </blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">It is, for the people who philosophically believe they won't survive the upload process.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">For example:</div><div dir="auto"><a href="https://www.brainpreservation.org/content-2/killed-bad-philosophy/">https://www.brainpreservation.org/content-2/killed-bad-philosophy/</a></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">It is a big issue for a lot of people.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">In fact, this bad philosophy affects even the cryonics community. Alcor, for instance, is opposed to using chemical preservation even though it likely results is less information loss. The opposition stems from the fact that the preservation chemicals are poisonous biologically. So here is an example where people who hope to survive by having their frozen brains thawed and ice damage healed, are jeopardizing the recovery of people who are philosophically inclined to believe in survival via scanning and upload to a new substrate.</div><div dir="auto"></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">When you want to build a bridge but don't know a lot about bridge-building, you over-engineer it, to do your best to make sure it will work. You don't try to figure out what is the weakest or cheapest, etc., bridge you can build that will still be safe, that stuff comes later.<br>
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> I expect there are certain features, which we don't yet know, that will determine whether an information pattern can be regarded as a mind, or that will give rise to subjective experience. If you're asking what those features are, the only answer anyone can give at present is "We don't know". I suspect we'll find out eventually.<br>
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> These are exactly the sort of questions one must ask to break through to seeing the unimportance of particular details in the pattern as being necessary to subjective survival.<br>
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You are assuming a conclusion here. </blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I established that conclusion in my write up.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">My suspicion is that 'particular details' will be very important - vital, even - for subjective survival, but we don't know what they are.</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">You discounted identical atoms.</div><div dir="auto">You discounted identical information patterns.</div><div dir="auto">What's left?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Let's get the answers before drawing any conclusions.</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I agree we should do everythingnwe can tk get answers.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">This will have to wait until we have the technology needed.<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Unfortunately, no technology or experiment will help in this case. Please see my document to understand why.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Jason </div></div>