| > If we are physical beings, then "consciousness" and anything else we have must be an emergent property of our physical components. If we can simulate those physical components, then this simulation will exhibit the same properties - consciousness and anything else one can attribute to us. Again, a simulation is not the thing. The map is not the territory. If consciousness truly emerges from actual physical processes of interacting brain matter (seems plausible), those _don’t exist_ in a computer simulation. In a simulation of a brain, from what substrate could consciousness emerge? The state of the simulated brain is stored in an arbitrary subset of locations in RAM, unknown to and non-interactive with each other, along with loads of other stuff the computer is keeping track of. Do you think consciousness could emerge automatically from the state of the right subset of locations in RAM, or is it whenever a relevant value in memory is changed due to a transistor opening, or is it when the simulation computation that will result in the RAM update is happening, or is complete? Per the Chinese Room argument, would consciousness still emerge if half the operations were actually performed off-CPU by human mechanical turkers with rule books and notecards? Nothing in the abstract computation will have changed. Consider also that physical reality runs in full parallel, while simulations on computers run serially per core. So if consciousness emerging requires the simultaneous interaction of many moving brain parts, that isn’t something that happens in a computer simulation. > Both classical and quantum physics can be simulated on a classical computer, to an arbitrary degree of precision Quantum physics can’t be simulated on a classical computer to an arbitrary degree of precision. Feynman didn’t think so, and he hasn’t been gainsayed yet. And classical physics is full of chaos and very sensitive to precision. |
Exactly the same substrate as our brains are derived from: physical particles and their interactions, perfectly replicated inside the simulation. If the simulation is accurate enough, the real particles and the simulated particles behave exactly the same, hence they produce the same results.
> Do you think consciousness could emerge automatically from the state of the right subset of locations in RAM
Hard question to answer since consciousness is hard to analyse. But we can turn it around into a question whose answer is the same, with a bit of rephrasing:
Do you think consciousness could emerge automatically from the state of the right subset of particles in our physical world, or is it whenever a relevant particle state are changed due to particles interacting according to the laws of physics, etc etc
> Consider also that physical reality runs in full parallel,
We don't really know this to be the case. It looks like that to us, but that could easily be an illusion created by mechanisms we can't observe. Just as characters in a video game can't observe how their world is simulated - everything is perfectly consistent whether it was calculated in one CPU thread or several.