X-Message-Number: 11663 Date: Sun, 02 May 1999 00:24:18 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Computer Simulations and "Reality" Raphael Haftka, #11646: > >It could be that I have missed something, but how do you know that our >`real' world is not a computer simulations in somebody's (possibly a >teenager in some real universe, based on how well things are going) computer? > A point I have been trying to make too. Bob Ettinger, #11648: >There's the rub, or one of the rubs. WHEN is the program "running" in a >Turing tape computer? During the time the machinery is moving the tape? >Hardly. During the time the head is reading or writing? Scarcely. This is where I really don't follow you. When changes are occurring within the system, by jeepers, the program is running--how could it be otherwise? "the head is ... writing"--that at least is a change, by any reasonable criterion. It may take *lots and lots* of these changes to add up to the events over even a small interval of time in the domain being emulated, but so what? You have subdivided the changes down and stretched them out over time, but certainly not eliminated them. The Turing system is by no means equivalent to a book that just sits there unchanging on your shelf. Daniel Crevier, #11649, I think describes a reasonable scenario, based on Moravec's *Mind Children*, in which you could be conscious and entirely within a machine. Another case like this happens all the time; it's called dreaming (where you do have a kind of consciousness, even if sound asleep). However, I wouldn't propose either to dream forever or to be forever confined to a machine with no interface to the outside. But, as I've argued, an interface wouldn't be ruled out, even with a slow and sequential, Turing machine emulation. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11663