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dfranke comments on We are not living in a simulation - Less Wrong
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The poem doesn't exist -- or, depending on what word games you want to play with "exist", it exists before it's written. Before anyone can experience the poem, you need to put it into a medium: pencil, ink, smoke, whatever. Their experience of it is different depending on what medium you choose. Your thesis seems to be that when we're talking about qualia, rather than poems, that the "information" in it is all that matters. In response I refer you to the "ETA" at the bottom of my post.
The poem is the type, the specific instance of the poem is the token. Types do, in a sense, exist before the first token appears, but this hardly renders instances of poems different from, say, apples, or brains. Everything has a type. Apples have a type.
The point remains: the type "Shakespeare's first sonnet" can be instantiated in ink or in pencil. This has nothing to do with the fact that the type "Shakespeare's first sonnet" exists before it's instantiated - because all types do (in the relevant sense).
Only because these media are distinguishable. I could write the poem down in india ink, or in, say, watercolor carefully done to look exactly like india ink, and as long as the two instances of the poem are indistinguishable, the reader's experience need not be any different.
How can we tell what the written poem looks like to the reader? We can ask the reader! We can ask him, "what does it look like", and on one occasion he might say, "it looks like ink", and on anther occasion he might say, "it looks like smoke". But we can do the same with the simulated person reading a simulated ink copy of Shakespeare's first sonnet. Assuming we have some way to contact him, we can ask him, "what does it look like," and he might say, "it looks like ink".
Maybe. But the central experience is the same. Maybe there's a difference between experiencing consciousness as implemented on a real brain versus consciousness as implemented inside a simulator. So long as it is possible to implement consciousness in different media, simulations make sense. If you're really a simulator's subroutine and not a physical brain, you wouldn't feel the difference, because you wouldn't know the feeling of having a real brain.