From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sun Jan 05 2003 - 13:47:41 MST
On Sun, 5 Jan 2003, Lee Corbin wrote:
> Here it is the Catholics who had it right. The "disability rights"
Yes, churches dwell upon the blight of people. It gives them more control
over the flock. Being poor, ignorant and young helps. Which where the
Catholics had it "right" once again, when they try to keep the woman
bareful and pregnant, eternally setting children into the world, and why
they idiotically insist against birth control in the poorest, starving
countries.
Their position is logical in regards to the wellbeing of the superpersonal
assembly 'Catholic Church', but it really sucks in regards to individual
people.
> hardliners maintain that if the choice is between a disabled person
> and a non-disabled person being instantiated, then they prefer the
> former. Personally, I disagree with them, but it may come down to who
Well, the world is full of crazy people.
> should decide, and whether a disabled person should have the legal
> right to conceive another disabled person. At moments like this I
> tend to lose my temper and shout WHOSE BUSINESS IS IT ANYWAY?
A physically disabled person, I presume. (Mentally severely disabled
persons have guardians, which decide for them). Given a known high risk I
would say that's borderline criminally negligent in regards to the child.
It also incurs costs on the society, which in this case should be carried
by the parents (e.g. via a disability insurance) since preventable.
If the parents deliberately choose to reject an available procedure which
would have resulted in a healthy child (let's say embryo screening for the
usual chromosome aberration and a library of known genetic defects) I'd
say this crosses the line. Whose business is it? The society's. If you
mistreat your child, you can lose custody. Willingly inflict gross defects
upon a child is clearly a very serious mistreatment, since irreversible.
> That patterns already exist is something which doesn't come
> easily to even most 21st century people. Greg Egan, in
Patterns are information. Information doesn't exist without a material
carrier.
> "Permutation City" raised consciousness on this topic as
> so often science fiction writers are the first to do. With
> his "Theory of Dust", he helps to prepare minds for the idea
> that whether a pattern exists on in computer memory, or on
> disk, or on paper cards, or in a biological organism, or at
> certain places in intergalactic space in the form of dust
> particles, doesn't matter a whit. Patterns are forever.
A pattern is meaningless in absence of an encoding and decoding system.
The Mars face is only a face as long there are monkeys which can
interprete that pattern as faceness.
IIRC, the extreme position of the 'dust theory' is that an enumeration of
all possible patterns -- regardless of sequence of ocurrence, whether
temporal or spatial -- implements all known realities. I don't agree with
this interpretation.
Even trivial sized systems cannot be enumerated fully, because systems
have a low limit on how many bits of state they can hold and how quickly
they can change. Assuming I have a specific system's evolution trajectory,
can I randomly jumble the frames, and still claim it's the same
trajectory? I don't think so. Each frame follows from another via
iterative transformation. I cannot skip frames, shortcutting terrain
inbetween without actually doing the computation work. So I can't know a
priori whether a given jumbled trajectory is just trash, or really
jumbled. So I have to make a computation at least once, and have a
reference record about how the original trajectory looks like relatively
to a given jumbled one.
> To illustrate, consider the integer
>
> 8051212150013250014011305000919001205050003151802
> 09140000002505190009000113000114000914200507051802
> 21200013250016012020051814000919002008012000150600
> 01001805011200160518191514000524091920091407151400
> 05011820080000000000000104000000090001130012051919
> 00200801140001000715150712050012151407022120001920
> 09121200011900251521002309121200190505002008051805
> 00091900141500041521022000200801200900011300080500
> 00000900080122050008091900041401000008091900130513
> 15180905190000080919000205120905061901140400160518
> 19151401120920250004091916151909200915141900000003
> 15141921122000200805002305090708202520010212050015
> 06000315142005142019000409180503201225000615121215
> 23091407...
Right now this pattern has been distributed over multiple systems all over
the world. Integers or patterns per se don't exist in absence of
production systems encoding and representing them.
> which by a most transparent cipher reads
>
> "Hello my name is Lee Corbin. Yes I am an integer
> but my pattern is that of a real person existing
> on Earth 2003 AD. I am less than a google long
> but still as you will see there is no doubt that
> I am he. I have his DNA, his memories, his beliefs
> and personality dispositions. Consult the weighty
> table of contents directly following..."
>
> A particular integer of this class exists as certainly
> as does the number 17, and like 17 has many objective
> properties. That this integer is not as *manifest*
No, that integer does not exist as long as you don't write it down, all of
it, or at least have given a production system allowing to reconstruct
that integer in a given shared context. Once you've scanned yourself, and
encoded that pattern into a material carrier, you can truthfully state
that number exists. Before, it's just a promise.
> to human intelligence as the number 17 doesn't change
> the reality.
>
> Why should some strings such as the above get run time
> and not others? More importantly, who should decide?
> The answers are clear if you cast away ancient prejudices
> and try to be logical.
This is not logic, Lee. You've built your system on a set of random
axioms. Not shared by most people. I notice you're making a pattern of
being consistently unreasonable.
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