Wait a second, this doesn’t make sense.
If the universe is timeless, then you don’t have to actually simulate the universe on a computer. You can just create a detailed model of the universe, put in the neccesery causality structure, stick it in the RAM, and voila! you have conscious beings living out their lives in a universe. You don’t even have to put it in the RAM, you can just write out symbols on a piece of paper!
Or can this impeccable line of reasoning be invalidated by experimental evidence?
By Eliezer’s line of reasoning above—that the subjective experience is in the causal change between one state and the ‘next’ then yes, symbols are as good a substrate as any. FWIW, this is how I see things too.
4 years too late but… this is missing the point of both Eliezer and IL. Eliezer/Barbour’s timeless physics has no changing state over time, because there is no time. Both states exist in a timeless configuration space, and the causal connection between them is only inferred. IL is trying to illustrate this leads to some pretty rediculous conclusions—such as that all you have to do is write down the states on a piece of paper, and then viola—you have created conscious beings even though no computation is actually going on.
EDIT: For what it’s worth I think the Barbour’s physics is a mysterious answer that doesn’t actually dissolve any of the questions it purports to solve..
All universes with causal structure obey laws that give them that causal structure, you have to check that your model follows those laws, this requires law-abiding computation.
Wait a second, this doesn’t make sense. If the universe is timeless, then you don’t have to actually simulate the universe on a computer. You can just create a detailed model of the universe, put in the neccesery causality structure, stick it in the RAM, and voila! you have conscious beings living out their lives in a universe. You don’t even have to put it in the RAM, you can just write out symbols on a piece of paper! Or can this impeccable line of reasoning be invalidated by experimental evidence?
18 months too late, but http://xkcd.com/505/
By Eliezer’s line of reasoning above—that the subjective experience is in the causal change between one state and the ‘next’ then yes, symbols are as good a substrate as any. FWIW, this is how I see things too.
4 years too late but… this is missing the point of both Eliezer and IL. Eliezer/Barbour’s timeless physics has no changing state over time, because there is no time. Both states exist in a timeless configuration space, and the causal connection between them is only inferred. IL is trying to illustrate this leads to some pretty rediculous conclusions—such as that all you have to do is write down the states on a piece of paper, and then viola—you have created conscious beings even though no computation is actually going on.
EDIT: For what it’s worth I think the Barbour’s physics is a mysterious answer that doesn’t actually dissolve any of the questions it purports to solve..
The process of generating the model requires law-abiding computations.
How do you know that?
All universes with causal structure obey laws that give them that causal structure, you have to check that your model follows those laws, this requires law-abiding computation.