[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 13 February 2010 00:41, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- 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.

I'll say it again: the claim that, a priori, a simulation cannot have
ANY property of the thing it is simulating is obviously ridiculous.

This does not entail that a simulation will necessarily have ALL the
properties of the thing being simulated. For example, if a simulation
of a human is as intelligent and conscious as a real human that does
not mean it will weigh the same and smell the same as a real human.



-- 
Stathis Papaioannou