I don’t think I was clear. I was trying to say that you can simulate just the minds in high-res, and the rest of the world in low-res. That reduces the computation by many orders of magnitude, since minds are such a tiny fraction of the physical universe.
Separately, I don’t think there’s any good reason to think we need molecular-level, let alone quantum-level process to explain consciousness. Thinking carefully about consciousness, it seems to me that neural networks, with specific properties and linked in specific ways, are adequate to explain our conscious experiences. But that’s neither here nor there for the compressed simulation point. And I haven’t written anything up, since explaining consciousness has little use in either academic neuroscience or AGI alignment.
OK but why would you need high res for the minds? If its an ancestor sim and chatbots can already pass the Turing test etc, doesn’t that mean you can get away with compression or lower res? The major arc of history won’t be affected unless they are pivotal minds. If its possible to compress the sims so they experience lesser consciousness than us but still are very close to the real thing (and havn’t we almost already proven that can be done with our LLM’s), then an ancestor simulator would do that.
I don’t think I was clear. I was trying to say that you can simulate just the minds in high-res, and the rest of the world in low-res. That reduces the computation by many orders of magnitude, since minds are such a tiny fraction of the physical universe.
Separately, I don’t think there’s any good reason to think we need molecular-level, let alone quantum-level process to explain consciousness. Thinking carefully about consciousness, it seems to me that neural networks, with specific properties and linked in specific ways, are adequate to explain our conscious experiences. But that’s neither here nor there for the compressed simulation point. And I haven’t written anything up, since explaining consciousness has little use in either academic neuroscience or AGI alignment.
OK but why would you need high res for the minds? If its an ancestor sim and chatbots can already pass the Turing test etc, doesn’t that mean you can get away with compression or lower res? The major arc of history won’t be affected unless they are pivotal minds. If its possible to compress the sims so they experience lesser consciousness than us but still are very close to the real thing (and havn’t we almost already proven that can be done with our LLM’s), then an ancestor simulator would do that.