Doesn’t this sound like a sneaky way for a mathematician to work on time travel?
replies(2):
Reverse the light cone, resimulate all moments of the past down to the neurotransmitter level. The thoughts, feelings, and memories locked inside your head.
From Neanderthal to Shakespeare to you, we could bring back everyone who has ever lived and put them in a theme park without any of them ever even knowing.
Some simulation instances might be completely accurate. For historians or as a kind of theme park or zoo.
Maybe that's us right now.
Some simulation instances might be for entertainment. They might resemble plain and ordinary, mundane day to day life (like this very moment), and then all of a sudden dramatically morph into a zombie monster outbreak tornado asteroid alien invasion simulator.
Or maybe it's obvious when a group of future gamer nerds log into an instance to role play Musk and Zuckerberg and Altman and speed run "winning". Or try to get a "high score".
Maybe it'll be eternal heaven - just gifted to us without reason or cause. That'd be nice.
Or perhaps and seemingly more likely, a bunch of sadomasochistic hell sims for psychopaths. Where some future quadrillionaire beams up into the matrix to torture poor people that used to live just for fun. It's not like we would have any rights or protections or defense against it.
Who knows.
2 - There might be a form of hubris in thinking that replicating a conscious person by copying all their neurotransmitters is enough to have a continuity between the original and the copy.
It can be easily evidenced if you consider that the people who tend to believe this, will have a level of granularity in their beliefs that depend on their era and their own knowledge, so maybe a century ago you'd think copying the nerve/neuron arrangement would be enough, and a few decades later someone would've said that you need the exact arrangement of molecules or atoms, while maybe in 2025 we'd be thinking in terms of electron clouds or quarks.
But to think that today we have finally arrived at a complete and final understanding of the basic blocks and surely, there is no possible finer understanding that would make our current view quaint in the eyes of a person from 2085 is the hubris I'm talking about.
Who said continuity mattered? How would a copy or original know which they were? Does it even matter?
How would you even know you were in a simulation? We seemingly don't have the tools to know.
Whatever the case, if you're the copy in the hell simulator getting thrown into the meat grinder, I don't really think the distinction of "original vs copy" is the most pressing issue.
> while maybe in 2025 we'd be thinking in terms of electron clouds or quarks.
We can't fathom what level of control over the physical world an advanced intelligence might have. Maybe they can create entire universes. Maybe there are structures and dimensions beyond our understanding. I don't know and can't reason about them, but I'm willing to prescribe them god powers on account of the fact I have no idea.
Maybe our logic and intuition, tools like Occam's Razor, are fixed to an artificial distribution of event occurrences that is entirely constructed. Perhaps not unlike the fundamental constants of the universe. We wouldn't know any differently.
None of this is not measurable. Indistinguishable from fantasy.
Continuity matters because I do not care if this imaginary (digital or physically reconstructed) artifact you came up with sometime in the future lives in a simulation of (your understanding of) my real life or in Sim city.
This thing is not "me", and I was replying to your assertion that
> Maybe it'll be eternal heaven - just gifted to us without reason or cause
This is not "us". This hypothetical is just a bunch of Sims characters running around in some virtual universe.