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A comment on The Unreasonable Reputation of Neural Networks. Parent comment

Re:The Unreasonable Reputation of Neural Networks by drdeca on Monday January 18, 2016 @08:13PM (#10928241)
Well, physically, yes. But as far as subjective experience goes, repeating states would not contribute to the total length of the subjective experiences. There is no way to distinguish whether the period of time between 5 and 10 seconds ago repeated exactly the same way a billion times before continuing or not. One assumes it didn't, but if it did, it wouldn't really matter that it did.

So for other things, it might be relevant that it continues to exist and repeats states, and it might even be worthwhile for it to make decisions while keeping in mind the fact that its decision might be at many different times (due to repeated states). But the length of its life internally viewed would still be finite, just with parts of it possibly having expression in infinitely many times of the external world.

As an absurd thought experiment, suppose that an entity arrives from the future, over the course of a year, builds a time machine, and then uses it to go back in time to become when it originally arrived. (as a bootstrap paradox sort of thing.) Would you say that the extent of the entities life is ~1 year, or infinite? There isn't any point in the cycle where it ends, but one wouldn't say that circles are infinitely long line segments, just because they don't have an end.

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Re:The Unreasonable Reputation of Neural Networks by meric on Monday January 18, 2016 @08:32PM (#10928330)
It wasn't specified anything was required of its subjective experience, the only requirement was for it to be immortal. There's a jellyfish on earth that is also immortal[1]; when it's hurt or sick, it can revert to the polyp stage - it's cells would transform, and it grow back into jellyfish with a new body. This process can repeat indefinitely. Each time it does this, it is likely it has a new set of subjective experience, but at the same time, the distinct set of subjective experiences are experienced by the same biological body of cells. If a biological being can be immortal this way, why can't AI's?

Humanity cannot conquer death, but this does not take away the immortality of living beings that already exist in our world.

Take a look at this 80,000 year old trees[3]. It's one living being in multiple trees with a single root system connecting all the trees into one being.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organis... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

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