In the computer game The Sims, simulated people (sims) navigate an environment, interacting with other sims. Even if they aren't being directly controlled by a user, sims will do some minimal amount of movement, performing simple actions. They are autonomous simulated agents of a very simple sort.
Suppose that we are watching (but not controlling) a particular sim. If another sim approaches this sim and, say, gets in a fight with it, it will remember this fight, in the sense that its behavior will be influenced by this experience.
So, at any point in time, this sim has some memory of what has happened to it recently. It knows whether a nearby sim has just appeared, and is about to start an interaction, or whether instead this nearby sim just concluded an interaction. In the first case, our sim finds no trace of a recent interaction in itself, while, in the second case, our sim finds itself angry or depressed by a recent fight.
Call the pre-interaction version of our sim "A", and call the post-interaction version "B". Is there any mystery about the fact that A finds itself to be pre-interaction, while B finds itself to be post-interaction?
In Good and Real, Gary Drescher uses the example of a simulated space in which there are large fast-moving balls and small slow-moving balls. Locally, the physics of collision are time-symmetric; if you observe a movie of a collision between just two balls, you cannot tell if the movie is being played forwards or backwards in time.
However, when you look at a movie of the whole simulation, you can easily identify the direction of time's arrow. How? By noticing that the large balls leave wakes behind them: paths that are cleared of small balls by the passage...
Related to: lesswrong.com/lw/qp/timeless_physics/
Why do I find myself at this point in
time, configuration space, rather than another point? In other words, why do I have certain expectations rather than others?I don't expect the U.S. presidential elections to have happened but to happen next, where "to happen" and "to have happened" internally marks the sequential order of steps indexed by consecutive timestamps. But why do I find myself to have that particular expectation rather than any other, what is it that does privilege this point?
My question is why I find myself to remember that the particle went left and then right rather than left but not yet right?
Yes, but why does my version experience this point of my branch and not any other point of my branch?
I understand that if this universe was a giant simulation and that if it was to halt and then resume, after some indexical measure of causal steps used by those outside of it, then I wouldn't notice it. Therefore if you remove the notion of an outside world there ceases to be any measure of how many causal steps it took until I continued my relational measure of progression.
But that's not my question. Assume for a moment that my consciousness experience is not a causal continuum but a discrete sequence of causal steps from 1, 2, 3, ... to N where N marks this point. Why do I find myself at N rather than 10 or N+1?