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.
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.