[ExI] simulation as an improvement over reality.

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Jan 02, 2011 at 10:56:47AM -0600, Damien Broderick wrote:

> But this is where any such discussion here keeps going off the rails.  
> Who cares about "perfectly synchronized systems"? The only relevance of  

How else are supposed to survive a direct nuke hit? By being a distributed
system, with multiple mirror nodes in the cloud, of course. Now,
that was easy, wasn't it?

As an example, consider a firewall cluster with stateful failover
(I'm configuring such a thing at the moment). Two machines do
operations on network traffic streams. The mapping is stateful, 
so the failover box must receive all state updates in realtime.
If one of them drops dead (is shot with a shotgun from a close
distance by a disgruntled server monkey), the second system
takes over seamlessly. Nobody outside notices a damn thing,
that's the whole point of stateful failover. This is only 
possible because the systems operate in lockstep. The firewall
is dead, long live the firewall.

> "copying" I can imagine is recovery from cryonic arrest (where you have  
> to hope nobody is stupid enough to perfectly copy your vitrified brain  
> and leave it at that) or uploading to a computer substrate VR or robot  

Yeah, resurrection in the flesh is pretty old-fashioned. And way
too expensive, for the same reason why manned spaceflight is
on the way out.

> body (where by definition the copy does not share the same viewpoint  
> with the biological original). Fanciful thought experiments that have  

That's the problem with people who say they're the same person
we talked to yesterday. They're complete impostors. How can they
*prove* they're the same? In fact, it is easy to prove they're
impostors. The turnover rate for parts of the CNS is less than
24 hours. They're not made from the same molecules! Zombies,
all of them. Everyone out there is a zombie, except for me, of 
course. The Capgras patients were not delusional, after all! 
I see dead people!

> you stepping into a black box and two of you emerging instantly in  
> lockstep are uninteresting and irrelevant to the real world, even if Lem  
> or John Varley or Greg Egan or Franz Kafka could write an amusing story  
> on such a premise.

Au contraire, they demonstrate that you can be in multiple places
at the same time (though you won't be able to enjoy the scenary).
It destroys the idea that your location is a label, and the
world lines matter. It prepares the ground for understanding why
whole body/brain emulation from a destructive cryopreserved animal
is not fundamentally different from a mere deep hypothermia lacune.

True believers into continuity magic better eschew general
anaesthesia. Or sleep. That should take care of the problem.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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