From: Bryan Moss (bryan.moss@btinternet.com)
Date: Mon Dec 03 2001 - 20:54:05 MST
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> > There's even a hint of an argument against simulations
> > here: if your physics allows you to state the exact
> > configuration of some part of the universe at a particular
> > time, then there's the chance that you're living in a
> > simulation, therefore you can't know that your physics is
> > correct -- PARADOX!
>
> No, not paradox. It simply means that you go on simulating
> the ancestors without being certain that your simulation
> uses the real laws of physics.
True. It might, I think, be expedient of physicists to make
"substrate dependence" a basic postulate of any new
fundamental physics. It wouldn't shock me given the current
crackpot-esque state of modern physics.
> Or if you can't get back the exact world-state, then you run
> a series of successive approximations.
How? Do we create an approximation, let it run to the present
moment, and then compare...? Seems unlikely. Even with the
precise, correct "world-state" there is no way of knowing it
is indeed the precise, correct "world-state." Retrodiction is
a bit difficult to confirm. I'd argue that we can rule out
any scientific uses of "ancestor-simulation," although that
really gets us nowhere what with all those potentially
mischievous posthumans running around. (Boundless possibility
rears its ugly head yet again.)
> Or for that matter the bizarre purpose behind the simulation
> could simply require some generic ancestorlike situations,
> not the reduplication of specific past history.
Perhaps (and "bizarre" is the word). This, of course, assumes
that there *are* "generic ancestor-like situation," which
there may very well not be at this level of "granularity." As
always, the whole thing might be designed to fool me (and
maybe you and a few others), for some perverse reason, and
pulls all sorts of dastardly tricks to keep us in check, but
such speculation is an exercise in the pointless.
BM
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