[ExI] Mindless Thought Experiments

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Sat Mar 1 09:36:54 UTC 2008


On 01/03/2008, John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote:

>  Somewhere in the universe there may be a language where this Email,
>  without changing a single character, expresses in perfect grammar the
>  instructions on how to operate a new type of can opener; but as neither
>  of us knows that language there is little danger of this conversation
>  being diverted into a discussion of can opener technology.

It is true that this email provides can opener instructions in some
possible language, but it is true only in a trivial sense. This is
because the instructions are only useful if you know the language, and
you can't "deduce" the language from random data unless you know what
it says in the first place. Similarly, a random physical system such
as atoms jostling each other in a gas might correspond to a member of
the set of all possible computers simulating a can opener, but this is
only useful if there is a means of decoding it: some sort of I/O
device is needed, which would require a conventional computation
containing at least all the information in the putative simulation to
"reverse engineer".

Now, what if the obscured computation at issue simulates an inputless
virtual environment with conscious inhabitants? We on the outside once
again will not be able to understand it or interact with it unless we
do the whole computation from scratch using a conventional computer.
But this should make no difference to the conscious inhabitants: they
remain conscious, isolated in their virtual world. For all we know, we
could be living in such a simulation, with no possibility of
communication with the world "outside" our universe.




-- 
Stathis Papaioannou



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list