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Not sure why this is an argument against simulationism. As far as I can tell, you're just making the point that any system could be regarded as simulating any

Not sure why this is an argument against simulationism. As far as I can tell, you're just making the point that any system could be regarded as simulating any other system given a sufficiently complex mapping. This seems more like an argument for simulation than against it. In fact, I first heard this argument a long time ago in high school as part of a discussion on panpsychism - the speaker claimed that a cup of tea was sentient because interpreted in a particular way, its thermal states could represent a self aware entity. The fact that you have to consider the complexity of the encoding scheme and not just the input and the output bit patterns is well understood in information theory. If I have an encoding scheme that has included in it a complete simulation of the universe, I can encode any video into 0 bits since the decoder will always know what I am about to request of it. The more the mapping is customized to the information you're searching for, the less complexity is needed in the input bit patterns to produce the desired output. If you go searching PI for a message, it'll probably take you longer to find it if you use the ASCII values of characters than if you use base64. You'll find it even quicker if you specify that 3='h' 1st 1='e' 4='l' 2nd 1='l' 5='o'. This all ultimately comes back to Ockham and parameters on a model. Models with more parameters can fit more things spuriously, so you want the model with the fewest parameters that can do the job. Minimum Description Length (and MML) is a great concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length

deleted 9y ago
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whatshisface 9y ago
It's possible to think about the complexity of going between encoding schemes, but unless you've got a special representation blessed as the right way to write things, you won't be able to build a tier system where some encoding schemes are more awkward than others. Normally we have no problem doing this because we can recognize a well-written answer when we see it, but that's based on no more than the way our own brains work (at best, on the parts of our brains that are the way they are because of the universe we live in.)
- kybernetikos 9y ago
  Even encoding schemes themselves have an information theoretic entropy level regardless of universe. Encoding schemes with less entropy can be considered more 'natural' - it's possible to come up with a measure of the 'naturalness' of encoding schemes in a pure mathematical sense without having to take into account entities beyond the mathematical realm.
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    If my understanding is right, a bijective function won't change the entropy of the strings it acts on. So, as long as I can find enough states in my grain of sand (quite possibly undoable, so imagine I'm talking about a few photons in space instead!), I can map them on to my universe and be no worse-off, from an information entropy standpoint.
    - jblow 9y ago
      A mapping is a computation. If your mapping is very complex compared to the ostensible simulator, then the mapping is actually doing most of the simulation. So the simulation is not mostly running when the ostensible simulator runs, it is running when you perform the mapping. If you are inside the universe being simulated and think you can do that mapping, it seems unlikely that there exist enough time and space for it.
      - whatshisface 9y ago
        Right, but if the role of the mapping is just to make the status of the simulation make sense to you, (after all, that's the only thing you would be able to observe it doing), then the inhabitant wouldn't care if the mapping was ever computed. So, it's fine if the mappings would be ridiculously impossible to compute. (Extra note: it is extremely hard to simulate the chaotic motion of nearly every physical system. Does that mean they are doing lots of hard computation? If so, does that make them "more likely" to be interpretable as simulating universes?)

deleted 9y ago

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whatshisface 9y ago

It's possible to think about the complexity of going between encoding schemes, but unless you've got a special representation blessed as the right way to write things, you won't be able to build a tier system where some encoding schemes are more awkward than others. Normally we have no problem doing this because we can recognize a well-written answer when we see it, but that's based on no more than the way our own brains work (at best, on the parts of our brains that are the way they are because of the universe we live in.)

kybernetikos 9y ago
Even encoding schemes themselves have an information theoretic entropy level regardless of universe. Encoding schemes with less entropy can be considered more 'natural' - it's possible to come up with a measure of the 'naturalness' of encoding schemes in a pure mathematical sense without having to take into account entities beyond the mathematical realm.
- whatshisface 9y ago
  If my understanding is right, a bijective function won't change the entropy of the strings it acts on. So, as long as I can find enough states in my grain of sand (quite possibly undoable, so imagine I'm talking about a few photons in space instead!), I can map them on to my universe and be no worse-off, from an information entropy standpoint.
  - jblow 9y ago
    A mapping is a computation. If your mapping is very complex compared to the ostensible simulator, then the mapping is actually doing most of the simulation. So the simulation is not mostly running when the ostensible simulator runs, it is running when you perform the mapping. If you are inside the universe being simulated and think you can do that mapping, it seems unlikely that there exist enough time and space for it.
    - whatshisface 9y ago
      Right, but if the role of the mapping is just to make the status of the simulation make sense to you, (after all, that's the only thing you would be able to observe it doing), then the inhabitant wouldn't care if the mapping was ever computed. So, it's fine if the mappings would be ridiculously impossible to compute. (Extra note: it is extremely hard to simulate the chaotic motion of nearly every physical system. Does that mean they are doing lots of hard computation? If so, does that make them "more likely" to be interpretable as simulating universes?)