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hwc comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong
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Epiphenominal theories of consciousness are kind of silly, but here's another situation I can wonder about... some cellular automata rules, including the Turing-complete Conway's Game of Life, can have different "pasts" that can lead to the same present. From the point of view of a being living in such a universe (one in which information can be destroyed), is there a fact of the matter as to which "past" actually happened?
Or, a Boltzmann brain that flickered into existence with memories of a past that never happened.
In that particular case, "never happened" has some weird ontological baggage. If a simulated consciousness is still conscious, then isn't its simulated past still a past?
Perhaps "didn't happen" in the sense that its future reality will not conform to its memory-informed expectations, but it seems like, if those memories form a coherent 'past', then in a simulationist sense that past did happen, even if it wasn't simulated with perfect fidelity.