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June 11

Permutation City - I'm lost

I've read it before, and didn't get it that time either...

From my understanding, the experiment on Paul Durham's Copy involves distributing his consciousness across time: he counts to 10, and the moment that he says 4, might come, in realtime, before he says 3. Am I right in thinking that? But what if something happens to him when he says 3 - say, a fly lands on his hand - how does the computer know to have the fly there when he says 4?

Be gentle - I feel like an idiot...

Adambrowne666 (talk) 23:45, 11 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

One explanation is that the whole premise is nonsense. If a process is complex enough to be ~~interesting~~ chaotic, like human thought, the only way to simulate a given moment of it is to simulate the preceding moment; the host computer could take snapshots of the process and then "replay" them by pasting the snapshots to main memory in random order, but why do that? Paul's Copy would obviously have no memory of this shuffling, because each memory is overwritten by the next paste. —Tamfang (talk) 22:49, 20 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]