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Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> on Sunday, April 04, 1999 wrote about lots of good thought experiments:
> Has the causal connection been broken or not?
I think some (not all) of your questions can be answered by having
a definition of causality that is consistent with our everyday use of
the term and yet produces few philosophical problems:
If event A causes event B that means two things and two things only:
in the opposite direction.
This asymmetry is useful, humans call one direction along the sequence of events "The Future" and the other direction "The Past". I don't know why the sequence is organized the way it is, I don't know why only one sequence seems to be real and thus only 2 directions exist in time. I'm not even sure it's true and there are only 2 directions in time.
Sometimes people feel there is a third property causality must have, namely a story that connects A to B, however as this invariably brings in other causal connections it obviously has no place in a fundamental definition.
I think most of the Turing machines you mention in your post would be conscious despite the unconventional way they operate; it's not difficult to extrapolate some bizarre and perhaps even disturbing conclusions from there, but so be it. Anyway, that's the way this Turing machine sees it.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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