X-Message-Number: 21331
From: 
Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2003 22:21:33 EST
Subject: semantics of simulation

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We have a physical (quantum) system, maybe you and your immediate 
environment. This is being simulated--hopefully emulated--by a classical 
digital computer. The system evolves over time by assuming successive quantum 
states. The computer evolves over time in various ways, depending on its 
physical makeup--whether electronic, mechanical, or something else. I think 
it is very important to remember that, in principle, the "computer" could be 
ANY automatic (mechanical, electronic, etc.) system for reading instructions 
and making/erasing discrete marks on a recording system of some kind. 
Conceptually, it could be just a human using a memorized system to write down 
or erase marks on a strip of paper (a non-mechanized Turing Tape), maybe 
using an abacus for intermediate calculations.

Basically what you have is just a sequence of sets of marks, corresponding to 
a sequence of sets of numbers. Most of the numbers are just temporary records 
of intermediate calculations. (Almost every quantum calculation is very long 
and laborious and can only be done stepwise to whatever approximation is 
considered adequate.) A subset of marks, which may be retained in permanent 
storage, is the succession of representations of states. These would 
correspond to pages in the Turing Tome. 

The marks on paper could look like anything, or you could work with 
magnetized regions on a chip, etc. Their arrangement could be of any orderly 
kind--maybe in "cells" labeled according to the degrees of freedom in phase 
space. So we need layers of interpretation. There is an isomorphism between 
the sets of symbols and the physical states of the simulated system. The 
marks are "really" numbers and the numbers are "really" renderings of values 
of coordinates in phase space. So does this mean that the whole is "really" 
you? 

I am not aware of any reason to believe this, unless you simply assume, as an 
article of faith, that isomorphism is everything. We have syntax, but not 
semantics, so to speak. The computer product is only a description of you and 
your life or potential life, not the actual you and not another you. 

Primitives sometimes believed that, in magic, you could gain power over a 
person by knowing his name. Isomorphists or uploaders seem to believe that, 
if you record a sufficiently careful description of something, you have 
created another of that thing--albeit perhaps in another contextual universe. 
But as far as I can see that is just playing with words.

The usual response of the uploaders is that our own inner experience is also 
"only" the shuffling of symbols such as signals in our brains. But my 
suggestion is that qualia do not arise from information processing as such, 
but require (are constituted by) specific physical processes or conditions in 
the brain, such as the right kind of standing wave (the self circuit). 
Analogy or metaphor or description won't do; you need the thing itself.

Robert Ettinger










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