If we care about the nature of morphisms of computations only because of some computations being people, the question is fundamentally what our concept of people refers to, and if it can refer to anything at all.
If we view isomorphic as a kind of extension of our naïve view of equals, we can ask what the appropriate generalisation is when we discover that equals does not correspond to reality and we need a new ontology as in the linked paper.
Actually, I started thinking about computations containing people (in this context) because I was interested in the idea of one computation simulating another, not the other way around. Specifically, I started thinking about this while reading Scott Aaronson’s review of Stephen Wolfram’s book. In it, he makes a claim something like: the rule 110 cellular automata hasn’t been proved to be turing complete because the simulation has an exponential slowdown. I’m not sure if the claim was that strong, but definitely it was claimed later by others that turing completeness hadn’t been proved for that reason. I felt this was wrong, and justified my feeling by the thought experiment: suppose we had an intelligence that was contained in a computer program and we simulated this program in rule 110, with the exponential slowdown. Assuming the original program contained a consciousness, would the simulation also? And I felt strongly, and still do, that it would.
It was later shown, If i’m remembering right, that there was a simulation with only polynomial slowdown, but I still think it’s a useful question to ask, although the notion it captures, if it does so at all, seems to me to be a slippery one.
Two points of relevance that I see are:
If we care about the nature of morphisms of computations only because of some computations being people, the question is fundamentally what our concept of people refers to, and if it can refer to anything at all.
If we view isomorphic as a kind of extension of our naïve view of equals, we can ask what the appropriate generalisation is when we discover that equals does not correspond to reality and we need a new ontology as in the linked paper.
Actually, I started thinking about computations containing people (in this context) because I was interested in the idea of one computation simulating another, not the other way around. Specifically, I started thinking about this while reading Scott Aaronson’s review of Stephen Wolfram’s book. In it, he makes a claim something like: the rule 110 cellular automata hasn’t been proved to be turing complete because the simulation has an exponential slowdown. I’m not sure if the claim was that strong, but definitely it was claimed later by others that turing completeness hadn’t been proved for that reason. I felt this was wrong, and justified my feeling by the thought experiment: suppose we had an intelligence that was contained in a computer program and we simulated this program in rule 110, with the exponential slowdown. Assuming the original program contained a consciousness, would the simulation also? And I felt strongly, and still do, that it would.
It was later shown, If i’m remembering right, that there was a simulation with only polynomial slowdown, but I still think it’s a useful question to ask, although the notion it captures, if it does so at all, seems to me to be a slippery one.