Which leads me to think about the people who say that if they found they were living in a simulation, they'd try to get out. Unless the simulation is very similar to the substrate, would it be possible to get out while remaining yourself in any sense?
Sure. Escape into another simulation.
More seriously, obviously it's not guaranteed that an organism in a simulation can just create a copy in the outside world. How would a Game of Life organism, made out of glider guns and flashers and whatnot, made an atom-based form of itself?
What it could do is create something isomorphic. Whether this is possible is pretty much the same question as whether humans can make uploads. (Which is the inverse, actually - going from 'reality' to 'simulation'.)
More seriously, obviously it's not guaranteed that an organism in a simulation can just create a copy in the outside world. How would a Game of Life organism, made out of glider guns and flashers and whatnot, made an atom-based form of itself?
Absolutely. It'll just take a superintelligence and some nano-tech.
Update: Please post new comments in the latest HPMOR discussion thread, now in the discussion section, since this thread and its first few successors have grown unwieldy (direct links: two, three, four, five, six, seven).
As many of you already know, Eliezer Yudkowsky is writing a Harry Potter fanfic, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, starring a rationalist Harry Potter with ambitions to transform the world by bringing the rationalist/scientific method to magic. But of course a more powerful Potter requires a more challenging wizarding world, and ... well, you can see for yourself how that plays out.
This thread is for discussion of anything related to the story, including insights, confusions, questions, speculation, jokes, discussion of rationality issues raised in the story, attempts at fanfic spinoffs, comments about related fanfictions, and meta-discussion about the fact that Eliezer Yudkowsky is writing Harry Potter fan-fiction (presumably as a means of raising the sanity waterline).
I'm making this a top-level post to create a centralized location for that discussion, since I'm guessing people have things to say (I know I do) and there isn't a great place to put them. fanfiction.net has a different set of users (plus no threading or karma), the main discussion here has been in an old open thread which has petered out and is already near the unwieldy size that would call for a top-level post, and we've had discussions come up in a few other places. So let's have that discussion here.
Comments here will obviously be full of spoilers, and I don't think it makes sense to rot13 the whole thread, so consider this a spoiler warning: this thread contains unrot13'd spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality up to the current chapter and for the original Harry Potter series. Please continue to use rot13 for spoilers to other works of fiction, or if you have insider knowledge of future chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
A suggestion: mention at the top of your comment which chapter you're commenting on, or what chapter you're up to, so that people can understand the context of your comment even after more chapters have been posted. This can also help people avoid reading spoilers for a new chapter before they realize that there is a new chapter.