X-Message-Number: 22378
From: 
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 10:29:26 EDT
Subject: subsimulations

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Added reminders:

First, as to Mike Perry's "frames of reference"--the notion that e.g. a 

static record, including time isomorphism, could still include active life of an

individual in the frame of reference of that simulation. It seems to me this is
justifying your postulate by trying to make it a definition--just playing with 
words. A sequence of film frames for a motion picture can be run on screen to 
give the illusion of action, and the static frames can be mentally 

interpreted as representing action, but to say that the frames in fact 
constitute action 
seems to me unjustified, just word games.

Second, think again a moment about subsimulations. If the upmorphists are 

right, maybe we are living in a simulation. For fairly obvious reasons, if there
existed any simulation of a substantial part of the universe and its history, 
the simulated people (at roughly our stage of development or a little higher) 
would necessarily create their own worlds of subsimulation, and in fact there 
would be a cascade of such. Now, I said earlier that a simulation might allow 
its creatures to modify the program to work magic. Suppose this is not the 
case, that nothing done inside the program can modify the laws of nature as 

enshrined in the program. Even in that case, the programmer in the metaworld 
could 
modify the program and work miracles. Furthermore, even if those "in" the 
computer could not see the outside world or directly affect it, the programmer 

could see the simulation. Therefore the simulated people could "pray" by making
requests to the programmer, who could then work miracles if he chose. In fact, 
the simulations might become smarter than the programmer and control him 
psychologically, making him in effect a captive genie. There's a nice science 
fiction premise that I haven't seen anywhere.

Robert Ettinger

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