Hal Ruhl writes > -----Original Message----- > From: Hal Ruhl [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Observer Moment?
> I do not understand what is meant by "Observer Moment" [OM]. > I went back and found the very first post that contains such > a reference. It was by Nick Bostrom and is at: > http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m68.html > > The language in this post indicates that various processes > take place during an OM.... Thanks for the homework. > Here we see processes such as discovery, preferring, and > concluding taking place within a moment. This remains common > in the language surrounding the idea of OM in the current > threads. See for example Stephen Paul King 's composite post > raising similar questions > http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m7192.html > How can a process take place within a single moment? Well, I don't have too much trouble with processes taking place in a "moment". Sure, in 1/100th of a second, it's hard to say that any process has had time to get very far. But if one were a computer program, and you got to "run" for a hundredth of a second, then get swapped out to disk, and then later on run for another hundredth of a second, you'd never know the difference. This line of thought was carried on in Greg Egan's "Permutation City" to quite a degree. Even for biological processes, it's *conceivable* that someday devices could work so fast and with such incredible accuracy that a person could be disassembled and at a later time be reassembled with no break in consciousness at all. And in these philosophic investigations, we are usually exploring what is true in principle. Where I join you (in failing to understand) is what happens as the OM becomes of zero length. I did not say *the limit as it becomes zero*, I said "zero". It's almost as though some people take this as license to suppose that time is not a necessary ingredient or even that time does not exist: There have been many, many investigations of this idea. It may not be an exaggeration to say that the main theme of this list has been a pursuit of the idea. But Stephen Paul King gives a very appropriate name to all the sponsors of these ideas, from Bruno and Russell, all the way to Julian Barbour: the time- deniers. The thread http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m6673.html started by Hal Finney in June had a few posts that touched on this what-is-to-me basic issue, and when I've finished with that thread I will follow up by posting replies to those posts. I am still at the point where I cannot quite imagine how a huge nest of bit strings (say all the real numbers between 0 and 1) manages to (in stasis) emulate all possible conscious experiences of all possible entities. But I still have an open mind. Lee