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If you believe in mathematical realism than the fact that there surely exists a mapping between a random set of data and a simulation with conscious agents in i

If you believe in mathematical realism than the fact that there surely exists a mapping between a random set of data and a simulation with conscious agents in it, that should be enough.

chr1 6y ago
It's not enough if the mapping function does not use the information from the random set. For instance it is easy to construct a mapping from ordered digits of pi to ordered letters of your comment, but all of the information of your comment will be in the mapping.
- canjobear 6y ago
  Exactly. The mapping function is almost always essentially a lookup table where you look up a dust configuration and get out a real-world configuration. The fact that you can construct this mapping doesn't mean much IMO.
- ajconway 6y ago
  I believe the argument goes like this: assume that conscious agents can be simulated (that is, consciousness is computable). What is computation? If sudden wind arranges leaves on the ground into a pattern that looks like “2 + 2 = 4”, was there a computation? We would usually answer “no”, as computation, like many other things, requires causal connection. But Greg Egan states that “there is nothing more to causality than the correlations between states”. Now, a deterministic simulation can be represented as a series of states recorded on a medium. Then you, an observer, can rewind and inspect what’s going on there, similar to reading a book or watching a movie. But the inhabitants of the simulation couldn’t care less about you observing their states. They already “exist”. In that case, why do we need the states of the simulation be recorded on the “film” in the order that makes sense for an outside observer? Surely a random arrangement would not affect the “simulation”. The same goes for the encoding. Now, if the arrangement doesn’t matter, and the encoding doesn’t matter, why there needs to be a specific physical medium at all? Surely somewhere in the Universe you can find arrangements of “dust” that “encode” the same states (in no particular order).
  - chr1 6y ago
    What does “encode” mean here? If it is supposed to contain the whole state in one chunk, the space of possible deterministic algorithms is too huge compared to the amount of dust, so it can't contain that. If it is supposed to find small chunks and rearrange them, it will not be using any information from the dust, and with same success encoder could use just any set of 0s and 1s. To circumvent finiteness of dust One could use digits of an irrational number or simple counting, but that is a very strange definition of existence. By that logic every possible history is just a number, so everything exists. The Important question is how to construct these numbers, find them in the sea of other meaningless numbers. I think Stephen Wolfram's idea of computational irreducibility is very useful here. It says that most computations (even very simple systems like some of cellular automata) cannot be replaced by other computations, and even to verify that a number represents result of a computation, one have to carry out that same computation. So the part of the book where states of the simulation are computed out of order is simply wrong, the latter state of the simulation could not have been computed without computing the intermediate states, and all the methods of computing that state were equivalent to the person living through that interval of time.
    - ajconway 6y ago
      You are still talking about mapping the simulation to a representation that will make sense to you. The episode that I found fascinating to think about is when a simulated character reflects on his existence: “And if the computations behind all this had been performed over millennia, by people flicking abacus beads, would he have felt exactly the same? It was outrageous to admit it-but the answer had to be yes.” It looks like the physical medium and the representation do not matter to the simulation, as long as computation occurs. Then the question is, what is computation. If you believe that all digits of Pi exist, then every possible computation should also exist. We don’t usually believe that. It seems that information in our universe cannot exist without some physical medium. The out of order computation was added to the story to make it more dramatic, the author states.
      - chr1 6y ago
mcguire 6y ago
Yours may be the finest argument for constructivism I have seen.

If you believe in mathematical realism than the fact that there surely exists a mapping between a random set of data and a simulation with conscious agents in it, that should be enough.

chr1 6y ago

It's not enough if the mapping function does not use the information from the random set. For instance it is easy to construct a mapping from ordered digits of pi to ordered letters of your comment, but all of the information of your comment will be in the mapping.

canjobear 6y ago
Exactly. The mapping function is almost always essentially a lookup table where you look up a dust configuration and get out a real-world configuration. The fact that you can construct this mapping doesn't mean much IMO.
ajconway 6y ago
I believe the argument goes like this: assume that conscious agents can be simulated (that is, consciousness is computable). What is computation? If sudden wind arranges leaves on the ground into a pattern that looks like “2 + 2 = 4”, was there a computation? We would usually answer “no”, as computation, like many other things, requires causal connection. But Greg Egan states that “there is nothing more to causality than the correlations between states”. Now, a deterministic simulation can be represented as a series of states recorded on a medium. Then you, an observer, can rewind and inspect what’s going on there, similar to reading a book or watching a movie. But the inhabitants of the simulation couldn’t care less about you observing their states. They already “exist”. In that case, why do we need the states of the simulation be recorded on the “film” in the order that makes sense for an outside observer? Surely a random arrangement would not affect the “simulation”. The same goes for the encoding. Now, if the arrangement doesn’t matter, and the encoding doesn’t matter, why there needs to be a specific physical medium at all? Surely somewhere in the Universe you can find arrangements of “dust” that “encode” the same states (in no particular order).
- chr1 6y ago
  What does “encode” mean here? If it is supposed to contain the whole state in one chunk, the space of possible deterministic algorithms is too huge compared to the amount of dust, so it can't contain that. If it is supposed to find small chunks and rearrange them, it will not be using any information from the dust, and with same success encoder could use just any set of 0s and 1s. To circumvent finiteness of dust One could use digits of an irrational number or simple counting, but that is a very strange definition of existence. By that logic every possible history is just a number, so everything exists. The Important question is how to construct these numbers, find them in the sea of other meaningless numbers. I think Stephen Wolfram's idea of computational irreducibility is very useful here. It says that most computations (even very simple systems like some of cellular automata) cannot be replaced by other computations, and even to verify that a number represents result of a computation, one have to carry out that same computation. So the part of the book where states of the simulation are computed out of order is simply wrong, the latter state of the simulation could not have been computed without computing the intermediate states, and all the methods of computing that state were equivalent to the person living through that interval of time.
  - ajconway 6y ago
    You are still talking about mapping the simulation to a representation that will make sense to you. The episode that I found fascinating to think about is when a simulated character reflects on his existence: “And if the computations behind all this had been performed over millennia, by people flicking abacus beads, would he have felt exactly the same? It was outrageous to admit it-but the answer had to be yes.” It looks like the physical medium and the representation do not matter to the simulation, as long as computation occurs. Then the question is, what is computation. If you believe that all digits of Pi exist, then every possible computation should also exist. We don’t usually believe that. It seems that information in our universe cannot exist without some physical medium. The out of order computation was added to the story to make it more dramatic, the author states.
    - chr1 6y ago

mcguire 6y ago

Yours may be the finest argument for constructivism I have seen.