[ExI] [Wittrs] Re: The System Level Issue

[Ben Zaiboc]

Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> credulously claimed:

> 
> On 6 July 2010 09:37, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Short of believing in some silly religion in which we
> all live as avatars in some glorified computer game, we must
> assume that the world exists before we make computations
> about it. It does not follow from the fact that we can
> compute process X that process X = a computation.
> 
> Even if we don't in fact live as avatars in a computer
> game, the point
> is that we could be. We wouldn't know. Moreover, if both
> are
> equivalent in content we would have no good reason to
> prefer being in
> reality to being in the simulation.


Stathis, what you fail to appreciate here is that a simulation /isn't real/.

Thoughts aren't patterns that can be reproduced in any suitable medium, so simulated thoughts can only be a thin shadow of the /real things/.  Thoughts are uh, well, let's not go there, ok?

So, according to this view, if we were in a simulation, we wouldn't know anything about it, because we wouldn't be real.  We wouldn't even exist.

Therefore, as we do exist, we cannot be in a simulation, because we are real, and simulations aren't. They're computations, and computations are, by their very nature, incapable of producing anything real.  

Well, they can produce real patterns, obviously, and really process real information, but that's irrelevant, because thinking is real. No, wait, I mean thinking is /not information processing/.  Yes, that's it.  So it can't be done in a simulation.  QED.  To think otherwise is to belong to a silly religion.  Do you want to belong to a silly religion? Do you?

Ben Zaiboc
(no, you can't persuade me otherwise, because I'm putting my real fingers in my real ears, and singing "LALALALALA" very loudly, with real soundwaves.  Over and over and over and over again. That's real repetition, by the way, not simulated repetition)