[ExI] Simulation

[Ben Zaiboc]

Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> (among others) wrote things such as:

> Spike, my brother--it pains me to say this, but that
> proposition about 
> simming a child seems to me to be fundamentally depraved.
>
 
> Descartes 
> allegedly flung cats out of his upstairs window to perish
> when they 
> struck the ground because his philosophy made much the same
> claim about 
> them.


Maybe the problem is the word "Simulation".  Some people take it to mean 'not real', and some take it to mean 'reconstructed', or something close to that.

If we are living in a simulation does that take anything away from the experience of living?  In what sense is a simulated environment not an environment?

I took Spike's example of a simulated child to be a 'child simulation'.  In other words, an actual child, just not a biological one.  It would be just as real as any child, and would be growing up, learning about the world, and about becoming a person.

Perhaps we need a different word to describe these kinds of simulation, to distance the concept from the negative, or 'false' connotations.

Ben Zaiboc