The price of a Bitcoin is the amount of other resource (possibly a more traditional currency, like electrum or cocoa beans ;) ) that two parties can agree to trade at.
Or it could be intentional misdirection, as with "favour". Not that I'm particularly invested in Satoshi==Szabo, but if I were interested in deflecting suspicion, that would be one obvious-looking way to do it.
Some abstraction would probably be involved; the idea is to recreate all the relevant activity that impacts consciousness while avoiding going any deeper, and most neuroscientists would (I think) speculate that individual molecules aren't necessarily the finest level of detail needed. Neurotransmitters, maybe, but I imagine a neuron doesn't have to be simulated as its constituent atoms to exhibit identical enough behavior.
A computer with input and output, yes. Some representation of relevant neurotransmitters and sensory inputs and such seems necessary. Think whole brain emulation, rather than extracting the "mind information" while ignoring all the physical information.
And if I make 100 copies of this computer program and run them on 100 different computers, which one will I be aware is me? Or will I just be aware of being 100 different beings at once? I think it should be obvious that a simulation of reality is not the same thing as reality itself. For one thing, perhaps we need to know a lot more about how the universe works at the quantum level to even emulate reality faithfully.
They are all you, until they start reacting differently to their different inputs and anything stochastic within their simulation, and at which point they stop being "the same" you is basically up to you. The difference between them after a minute or two would probably be nothing compared to the difference between you and you a year ago; if you call the latter "you", the former should probably count too. You wouldn't be aware of being 100 beings, but 100 yous would be aware of existing.
Calculating down to the quantum level is hopefully not necessary (that seems impossible to get efficiently out of any computing substrate physics will let us have). The few people suggesting that physics at that scale impacts consciousness aren't taken very seriously by neuroscientists in general.
> Like for example manually copy/pasting stuff from your managers Excel sheet into phpmyadmin. This can take you days, and it is really boring. You cannot always quit your job when you got a boring task.
As valuable as accepting inevitable boring tasks is, that seems to leave you not much room to want to automate the task. Does anyone have something deep to say about simultaneously being accepting of your circumstances and seeking ways to improve them?
There is nothing wrong with completing tasks the most efficient way possible.
In this case, the copy/paste action was just the most boring task I could imagine. Please replace this phrase with "a boring task you cannot escape at best will". It's not really about Excel to phpMyAdmin.
I actually have seen a guy doing something like this before years. Thats why it came to my mind. This guy was not a competent programmer. I should have used a different example maybe. But it is not so easy to find a "boring task" which cannot be automated in todays dev world.
Disclaimer: maybe nothing "deep to say", but this is the story which came to my mind, when I wrote the post. In my opinion, Zen has nothing to do with fatalism as might be understood with this example. Go ahead, make things better. I am thinking about replacing this example, because it came back to me several times now.
In any case, thank you for taking the time reading it and asking this question.
The only insight I have is that doing so is a balanced, middle road response (left road is accept everything, right road is change everything). The Serenity Prayer captures this attitude:
What's fairness?