[ExI] digital simulations, descriptions and copies

[Gordon Swobe]

--- On Sat, 1/23/10, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:

>> The book about the apple describes the apple, and the
>> digital simulation acts only as a translation of the book.
>> No matter whether the description exists in book form or in
>> digital form, it only describes the apple and descriptions
>> of things do not equal the things they describe.
> 
> Ah, so you *almost* get it. But you still confuse yourself
> by conflating emulation and description. The Apple apple is
> just another description; it can't be an emulation. But a
> calculator represented on a computer monitor can be both, 

I would consider an emulation of an apple a copy, and yes we cannot create emulations of apples, I already covered that subject in my first post in this thread. So yes I get it.

In this thread I target such religious nonsense as that which I see when people say that digitally simulated people can eat and taste digitally simulated apples. Eric has come forth to defend that idea. Will you defend it too?

It seems to me that a digital simulation of a person eating apples exists only as a description of someone eating and tasting apples, not as anyone actually eating and tasting apples, and so I must bracket the terms. 

Digitally simulated people can eat digitally simulated apples in the same sense that "Gandalf" can "smoke" a "pipe" in "Middle Earth", which is to say they "eat them", but *not really*. 

-gts