It's only "insulin" and "cells" for someone interpreting the program. The issue here is that if you had a simulated brain, what makes that simulation a brain for the computer such that it would be conscious? Here's Jaron Lanier on the issue of consciousness and computation: http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html He's meteor shower intuition pump is similar to the argument that nations should be conscious if functionalism is true. The reason being that any complex physical system could potentially instantiate the functionality that produces a conscious state. It's also similar to Greg Egan's…
It's funny because we have this discussion only pertaining to humans, if we were to produce a replica computer from computer-0, we'd rename it to computer-1 and that's that. It's just because humans want to name themselves we have issues, and we can't easily ascribe a human another name (it would mean rewriting the memory of the replica to remember being called something else). Btw, we talk about replica's but that's only because we assume the process leaves an original and a copy, but that's not necessarily so, for example a photon of high energy can split into 2 photons of lower energy. We…
I've already read through most of Greg Egan's works, but it's good to see like-minded people out in the wild! Simulations can have explanatory power and can potentially have falsifiable predictions. One prediction of a simulated universe is that any such computer would be built on a budget. As in, you'd expect all aspects of the the compute substrate to have finite "limits" that manifest at the extremes of the simulation. For example: 1. Finite resolution -- Plank length. 2. Finite information propagation speed due to simple "update next cell based on neighbouring cells" simulation --…
People don't have any real control with what happens in their life. Sure they do. Saying that people don't have control over anything is like saying "the light switches in my house don't control the lights because the switches can't do anything without a person flipping them". Just because there's no spontaneous self-generated action that a switch can perform by itself doesn't mean that the switch isn't controlling something. Looking at this from a different angle, do you believe that a digital simulation of your brain would produce the same kind of subjective experience of consciousness…
I finished the book last night. It's not a long read in terms of pages, but in the first half particularly it took me quite a few stops to ponder about what had been laid in few sentences. Greg Egan is awesome. (Sort-of SPOILERS underneath) I can actually grasp the Dust theory thing pretty well as I followed Durham's realizations, however I somehow can't fathom the "more practical" TVC universe stuff, and perhaps you can enlighten me: - TVC starts with borrowed compute but somehow connects to the Dust Theory, right? - The whole "TVC is software and compute-based" at first (some software…
This article doesn't actually explain Dust Theory to someone who hasn't read the book. I haven't found a good standalone explanation of the theory that explains it in a compact manner so my recommendation to people is to read the book. Permutation City is among my top 5 favorite books because I found Dust Theory so mind blowingly amazing from a philosophical standpoint. I haven't seen it discussed elsewhere outside the lesswrong.com forums (which are famous for creating Roko's Basilisk). It's only $3 on Amazon so it's worth picking up if you're a fan of hard sci-fi that gets into the…
It has admittedly been a long time since I've read the book, so my recollection of it may be a bit hazy, but: > Why would a few minutes of compute offer Durham any more relief than a second of it, a theoretical proof of it, or a billion years of it? Since they are even in a position to kickstart something computable, it mathematically exists, therefore by the Dust theory they don't even need to start it in order for everything in the book to happen. Admittedly, that makes for a much shorter book (or a billion trillion other scenarios and then some, whatever floats one's boat) I'd guess for…
Greg Egan brought up this idea in his novel Permutation City, only to have a change of heart some years later. To quote his FAQ[1]: > What I regret most is my uncritical treatment of the idea of allowing intelligent life to evolve in the Autoverse. Sure, this is a common science-fictional idea, but when I thought about it properly (some years after the book was published), I realised that anyone who actually did this would have to be utterly morally bankrupt. To get from micro-organisms to intelligent life this way would involve an immense amount of suffering, with billions of sentient…
For me, several books by Greg Egan fall into this category. Permutation City, Diaspora, Quarantine, and Schild's Ladder have all... changed me. I was a different person before and after I had read those books, and now I categorise all works of fiction into those that forever alter my way of thinking and those that do not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan#Novels Which reminds me, I should finish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_(series) The Culture series by Iain Banks, especially Inversions also satisfy this requirement, as does The City at the End of Time by Greg Bear:…
Surprised to see Permutation City in that list. Given that the book is written in 1994, Gregg displays admirable prescience about how computing would develop. Honestly you would think it was written in the last 5 years or so. His vision of cloud computing is absolutely outstanding. It blew me away when I checked when the book was written after reading the first few chapters. I'd read Schild's Ladder prior to reading Permutation city, which is also a good read. It does seem to get bogged down in the technical and descriptive side of things at times, however, it's a fantastic idea for a story.…