From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!newshost.uwo.ca!torn.onet.on.ca!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!linac!uchinews!tira!stephen Tue Jun  9 10:06:20 EDT 1992
Article 6033 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!newshost.uwo.ca!torn.onet.on.ca!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!linac!uchinews!tira!stephen
>From: stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu (Stephen P Spackman)
Subject: Re: Hypothesis: I am a [sensory] Transducer
In-Reply-To: santas@inf.ethz.ch's message of 1 Jun 92 21:45:36 GMT
Message-ID: <STEPHEN.92Jun1235727@estragon.uchicago.edu>
Lines: 67
Sender: news@uchinews.uchicago.edu (News System)
Organization: University of Chicago CILS
References: <1992Jun1.023730.20079@Princeton.EDU> <1992Jun1.035818.6822@u.washington.edu>
	<STEPHEN.92Jun1004316@estragon.uchicago.edu>
	<1992Jun1.214536.2308@neptune.inf.ethz.ch>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1992 04:57:19 GMT

[hi!]
In article <1992Jun1.214536.2308@neptune.inf.ethz.ch> santas@inf.ethz.ch (Philip Santas) writes:
|I would say that the absence of an object defines a real world too.
|Think of the world before your birth. You were not there,
|even if we assume that the evolutionary path was leading to your creation.
|This world was very much real. 

When I imagine a tree falling in a forest, I can imagine it whistling
God Save the Queen. I can *imagine* the world before my birth, but I
cannot experience it. I'm not (nor ever was) embedded in it; for me,
it isn't real - or at least, no more real than plenty of other
possible worlds I can cook up with equal ease. Maybe, of course, you
are older than I am - but your information base is different from
mine, anyway.

Alright, I admit it, I come from a religious background, and I believe
in the indefeasibility and the irrelevance of an extratemporal
creation: whether the past "happened" is for me an immense
non-question. ONLY consistency models apply to it.

|On the other hand you can have _identical_ impressions of your environment
|while living in different realities, simply because you cannot process
|or grasp the whole reality. Newtonian theory can be sufficient for two worlds
|which obey or not obey to the principles of relativity (in the one case it is 
|the limit humans can understand, in the other it is the general rule)

Or we can define those as the same world, the same reality. Probably
healthier, and more along the lines that physics has been persuing of
late.

|>[Actually it's a little trickier because there are multiple
|>information channels linking two people, even - especially - when the
|>two people are identical. There are some amusing pathologies that can
|>be constructed; a neat one person case is the upside-down glasses
|>experiment; for the two-person case - have you ever had the experience
|>of body-map crossover with (say) a lover, when you can't figure out
|>who some piece of anatomy belongs to?]
|
|But after enough practising you can distinguish your parts from the others.

That's a profoundly interesting fact, because it isn't a necessary
characteristic of such systems, from the mathematical perspective.

|>So a simulated person in a simulated world stands (and
|>indistinguishably so) in the same relation to hir environment that a
|>real person in a real world does - and a different one that a
|>simulated person in a real world or a real person in a simulated world
|>does, since in each of the latter cases there is an essentially
|>arbitrary interface layer involved.
|>
|>That's what Gibson's (rather unconvincing) cyberspace is about - why
|>it has psychological power. Trite Godel reference goes here.  More
|>important in practise, it explains why in "hard" CS virtual machines
|>are such a big issue: it is (syntacto-) semantically essential that
|>the actuality of reality be undecidable on the basis of internal
|>evidence.
|
|Not if one discovers more facts about the reality.
|Then there is a transit period, untill one comes to the equilibrium
|about the actual reality, and its internal represenation.

But there is in general a limit to the "facts" that you can discover.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
stephen p spackman         Center for Information and Language Studies
stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu                    University of Chicago
----------------------------------------------------------------------
       Believe in Strong AI? I don't even believe in Strong I!


