Hal writes > I did mention the question of whether a given calculation > instantiated a given OM. Maybe "instantiate" is not the > right word there. I meant to consider the question of whether > the first calculation added to the measure of the information > structure corresponding to the OM.
I think that both the word and the meaning are clear. Consider the following "gentle seduction" approach. One day instead of artificial hearts, people get---piece by ---piece, artificial brains; and let us, just for the purpose of clarifying the above, suppose that this happens without much protest (say in the year 2100). Of course, *many* here do protest, but let's just imagine that it becomes accepted anyway. Then a lot of "people" are walking around with very complicated programs for minds. Since they act and talk just as we do, let's inquire as to how they would report on the above discussion. While someone's body is undergoing repair, it may happen that he or she can rent a replacement body. It may even happen that for the duration of the operation, their program (i.e. what we think of as their mind) is temporarily halted. This too would seem unobjectionable given the original premise above that in 2100 people have artificial brains made of silicon. Finally, instead of just being unconscious, that is, absent, during the operation, it might be that they could download their program into some small device that furnished only virtual reality. This too would be equally unobjectionable, given the aforesaid premise. So while some very small machine somewhere was "hosting" them, we could very well say that that particular machine was *instantiating* them, could we not? This is how I would use the terms. One could even go further and say that a person could be instantiated in more than one place at a time. After all, today we speak of your computer being able to instantiate a program (give runtime to), while my computer can do the same thing with a different instance of the same program. So the big "Everything" claim, or Schmidhuber conjecture, (or I don't know what to call it) is that you and I are *already* being instantiated by abstract mathematical patterns (the UDist, for Universal Distribution). This conjecture, of course, is hotly debated, but I think that what is being claimed is clear. Does anyone disagree with the *clarity* of what I have written, or can anyone have a problem with any of the *words* I used? (We must before anything else make sure that we are communicating.) Lee