On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 11:29 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:
>> Yes we could be part of a computer simulation, but the computer >> simulating us must be operating according to physical law, unless it is >> also a simulation. But unless it's turtles all the way down eventually >> you're going to hit the bedrock of physical reality. > > > *> This is the case if the physical laws that we observe are universal > across all possible universes,* > Not necessarily, in a simulated universe we could make fundamental physical laws be anything we like, we could even make a Harry Potter universe if we wanted to. But eventually you're going to come to a universe that is not simulated and obeys fundamental natural laws of physics unless, as I said, the chain is infinitely long and it's turtles all the way down. > *> Or physics could be an emergent property of consistency between > computations.* > That's basically what I've been saying, physics can tell the difference between a correct computation and an incorrect one; if you assume that true paradoxes cannot exist then you're gonna need something like that to resolve them. You might even say resolving paradoxes is the very definition of physics. *> And since you, like me, are a strong believer in Darwinism, we don't > even have to go into the metaphysical. You might also want to consider that > there is no reason for evolution to provide us with direct access to > reality.* > True. Evolution only required us to be good at surviving on the African savanna, but doing that required quite a bit of intellectual firepower. That's why we find that hand eye coordination is easy but solving partial differential equations is hard even though our recent work on computers has taught us that from a fundamental viewpoint catching a baseball requires more intellectual activity than solving Maxwell's Equations, computers have been able to do that for years but a robot can't match the dexterity of even a mediocre baseball player. At least not yet. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> mbp -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv29asHY9VY-thO0nbXX0aHdup5LdcJhx1pg039PWna2QA%40mail.gmail.com.
