PaulAlmond comments on Consciousness of simulations & uploads: a reductio - Less Wrong

1 Post author: simplicio 21 August 2010 08:02PM

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Comment author: PaulAlmond 27 August 2010 01:55:56AM *  0 points [-]

All those things can only be done with simulations because the way that we use computers has caused us to build features like malleability, predictability etc into them.

The fact that we can easily time reverse some simulations means little: You haven't shown that having the capability to time reverse something detracts from other properties that it might have. It would be easy to make simulations based on analogue computers where we could never get the same simulation twice, but there wouldn't be much of a market for those computers - and, importantly, it wouldn't persuade you any more.

It is irrelevant that you can slow down a simulation. You have to alter the physical system running the simulation to make it run slower: You are changing it into a different system that runs slower. We could make you run slower too if we were allowed to change your physical system. Also, once more - you are just claiming that that even matters - that the capability to do something to a system detracts from other features.

The lookup table argument is irrelevant. If a program is not running a lookup table, and you convert it to one, you have changed the physical configuration of that system. We could convert you into a giant lookup table just as easily if we are allowed to alter you as well.

The "unplug" one is particularly weak. We can unplug you with a gun. We can unplug you by shutting off the oxygen supply to your brain. Again, where is a proof that being able to unplug something makes it not real?

All I see here is a lot of claims that being able to do something with a certain type of system - which has been deliberately set up to make it easy to do things with it - makes it not real. I see no argument to justify any of that. Further, the actual claims are dubious.

Comment author: PaulAlmond 27 August 2010 02:04:41AM 0 points [-]

As a further comment, regarding the idea that you can "unplug" a simulation: You can do this in everday life with nuclear weapons. A nuclear weapon can reduce local reality to its constituent parts - the smaller pieces that things were made out of. If you turn off a computer, you similarly still have the basic underlying reality there - the computer itself - but the higher level organization is gone - just as if a nuclear weapon had been used on the simulated world. This only seems different because the underpinnings of a real object and a "simulated" one are different. Both are emergent properties of some underlying system and both can be removed by altering the underlying system in such a way as they don't emerge from it anymore (by using nuclear devices or turning off the power).

Comment author: Perplexed 27 August 2010 02:35:31AM *  1 point [-]

It would have to be a weapon that somehow destroyed the universe in order for me to see the parallel. Hmmm. A "big crunch" in which all the matter in the universe disappears into a black hole would do the job.

If you can somehow pull that off, I might have to consider you immoral if you went ahead and did it. From outside this universe, of course.