Hi Norman,
> At last, I may be getting a glimmering of understanding of your point of > view (which doesn't mean that I agree with you). Thanks for your patience. > > You seem to be saying that it is irrelevant if a Turing Machine, even one > that operates at the speed of light, takes a billion years to simulate one > second of a cubic meter of space. The fact that it CAN simulate the cubic > meter for one second, irrespective of the time it takes to do so, means that > the computationalist hypothesis is true. > > But, as you point out, this isn't a ''bona fide'' simulation because it's > not in "real time." > > My problem is that if it's not bona fide then it's imaginary - a Harry > Potter universe - and I don't understand how this imaginary happening can be > a proof of the computationalist hypothesis, or of anything else in the real > universe. The observer living in the simulated universe perceives his universe in the same way as we perceive our uiverse. He experiences the simulated time, not our time. Because we are simulating our laws of physics, the simulated observer won't be able to detect any deviations in the laws of physics in any experiment. Only some boundary condistions, such as the size of the observable part of his universe could be different because of the fundamental limitations on simulations. Saibal ------------------------------------------------- Defeat Spammers by launching DDoS attacks on Spam-Websites: http://www.hillscapital.com/antispam/