[extropy-chat] Fragmentation of computations

[Lee Corbin]

Anna writes

> I can see how through reading history it could be
> possible to imagine machinery to exhibit any moment in
> the past, I could see how in philosophy, the
> probability that moving around information
> instantaneously may seem problematic, and based on my
> beliefs, "God does have to have already known it
> before your present moment was computed".
> 
>> The model which we were thinking about, however, did
>> not contain ---I think it's proper to say---an
>> observer. We were discussing a computation of a
>> subject, that is, of an entity, and that being need
>> not have any sense experience to confuse the issue. 
> 
>> Then the next step was to load a sequence of such
>> states into storage so that a "movie" could be
>>  re-run, or load them into a look-up table using for
>> the address a perfect hash function of the state. 
> 
> Would that mean either the movie is being re-run or it
> is being written at new?

This is a re-run.

> What makes for a really block buster movie, a re-run or a newly written script?

:-)  

> Even if you load it into a table, you won't know what
> to pick out.  What will be the best run of a database
> program? A13+D42 or A1 + B1 or A1+ (T1+D42) +
> {(T2-T1)(A13..ect..)

Yes, right.  I confess that it is "obvious" to me that the
mere re-running of a movie, no matter how fantastically
detailed, cannot possibly qualify as process with which
we should have any sympathy, or attribute to it any
real internal experience.  Ultimately it can come down
to a moral question, since what we are ultimately after
is what actions we should take. And I consider movies
expendable, at least when compared to the real lives
of real people.

Lee