[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

[Gordon Swobe]

--- On Thu, 2/11/10, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

>> The sensible people on the jury will find that a
>> mixed-up child or perhaps a philosophically-challenged adult
>> used a hi-tech weapon disguised as a computer game to shoot
>> a real person.

>... the claim that, a priori, a simulation cannot have ANY property of 
> the thing it is simulating is obviously ridiculous.

Is it? In the incident you describe, only a *depiction* of a shooter exists in the game, and depictions of people have no reality. Or to put it another way: they have the same kind of reality, and the same legal standing, as photographs and drawings and other depictions of people.

The human game-developer or the human game-player will go to prison or to a psychiatric facility for the criminally insane. The simulated shooter in the game will never know or care; he has no real existence.

-gts