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JGWeissman comments on We are not living in a simulation - Less Wrong
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This would imply that qualia are epiphenomenal. If so, and when people talk about qualia they are accurately reporting them, without the epiphenomenal qualia causing the accurate report, where does that improbability come from?
I don't understand why you think it would imply that. The claims in my second-to-last paragraph clearly imply that they are not epiphenomenal. Where have I contradicted myself?
The idea is that If you were simulated on that computer and someone asked you to describe your qualia, you could do it perfectly - despite having not qualia! This is a bit magical.
The simulation does not receive any feedback from the spark plugs, and so, within the simulation, everything is the same whether the spark plugs are there or not, so the qualia are (only) in the spark plugs, the simulation does the same thing whether the qualia exist or not, i.e. the qualia have no causal effects on the simulation, which is what I mean by saying they are epiphenomenal.
The spark doesn't have any effect on the simulator, but that doesn't mean that the simulator can't predict in advance what effect that spark would have if it occurred inside a brain and reason accordingly. You seem to be implying that the simulator can't determine what effect the spark (and its resulting qualia) would have before the spark actually occurs. This isn't the case for any other physical phenomenon -- I don't have to let go of a ball in mid-air to predict that it will fall -- so why would you suppose it to be true of qualia?
The simulator can make that prediction and apply the results within the simulation even if it is not connected to the spark plugs.
No, I am implying that since you can make the prediction, the actual spark isn't important.
Why is this different from the claim that because you can make the prediction of what gravitational field a massive sphere will produce, the actual sphere isn't important?
Within the simulation, having an actual sphere is not important, the simulator applies the same prediction to the simulator either way. If you care about effects outside the simulation, then you would need an outside-the-simulation sphere to gravitationally attract objects outside the simulation, in the same way that you would need to report a simulated person's musings about their own qualia (or other reactions to their own qualia) to me outside the simulation for their qualia to affect me in the same way I would affected by similar musings (or other reactions) of people outside the simulation that I learn about.
I think I can justly paraphrase you as follows:
If this paraphrasing is accurate, then I ask you, what does "occurring inside the simulation mean"? What is the physical locus at which the gravity and qualia are happening? I see two reasonable answers to this question: either, "at the simulator", or "nowhere". In the former case, I refer you back to my previous reply. In the latter case, you concede that neither the gravity nor the qualia are real.
Your position within our universe is giving you a bias toward one side of a mostly symmetrical situation.
Let's throw out the terms "real" and "simulated" universe and call them the "parent" and "child" universe.
Gravity in the child universe doesn't affect the parent universe, true; creating a simulation of a black hole doesn't suck the simulating computer into the event horizon. But gravity in the parent universe doesn't affect the child universe either - if I turn my computer upside-down while playing SimCity, it doesn't make my Sims scream and start falling into the sky as their city collapses around them. So instead of saying "simulated gravity isn't real because it can't affect the real universe", we say "both the parent and child universes have gravity that only acts within their own universe, rather than affecting the other."
Likewise, when you say that you can't point to the location of a gravitional force within the simulation so it must be "nowhere" - balderdash. The gravitational force that's holding Sim #13335 to the ground in my SimCity game is happening on Oak Street, right between the park and the corporate tower. When discussing a child-universe gravitational force, it is only necessary to show it has a location within the child-universe. For you to say it "doesn't exist" because you can't localize it in your universe is as parochial as for one of my Sims to say you don't exist because he's combed the entire city from north to south and he hasn't found any specific location with a person named "dfranke".
This calls for a port of SimCity to a mobile device with an accelerometer.
This is a digression, but... I'm not sure it actually makes sense to claim that what holds Sim #1335 to the ground is a gravitational force, any more than it would make sense to say that what holds an astronaut connected to the outside of their shuttle via magnetic boots is a gravitational force.
What it is, exactly, I don't know -- I haven't played SimCity since the early 90s, and have no sense of how it behaves or operates. But I'd be really surprised if it were something that, if I found myself in that universe having my memories, I'd be inclined to call gravitation.
In addition it should probably be pointed out that real things in general don't need to have a location. I think we can all agree that the electromagnetic field is real, e.g., but the question "Where is the electromagnetic field?" is nonsense.
The claim that the simulated universe is real even though its physics are independent of our own seem to imply a very broad definition of "real" that comes close to Tegmarck IV. I've posted a followup to my article to the discussion section: Eight questions for computationalists. Please to reply to it so I can better understand your position.
Not quite. Where as with the simulation of the sphere you need to an actual sphere or equivalent mass to produce the simulated effect outside the simulation, with a simulated person you need only the simulated output of the person, not the person (or its physical components) itself, to have the same effect outside the simulation as the output of a person from outside the simulation. The improbability of having a philosophy paper copied from with the simulation that describes qualia is explained by the qualia within the simulation.