You say :”The main point is this: by merely imagining that I want to make a trade, I have narrowed the class of entities I can trade with from “all plausible entities” to “entities who would accept the trade I want to make” I honestly don’t see how this is relevant to my question.
My question was not ‘is it possible to answer questions by spinning up minds who know the answers to those questions?’ , which seems to be how you’ve interpreted it. Nonetheless, that question is certainly an interesting one, and I’m not completely sure I agree with your answer to it, because of computational irreducibility. Just because you’re uncertain of something, this does not mean that you cannot increase your certainty about it without ‘causal communication with things around you’ (i.e. observation), because sometimes simply thinking in more depth about it can help you to resolve logical uncertainty. Perhaps you could do this by ‘spinning up’ a mind. (After I read further I realized you already pointed this out. Sorry about that. I was writing my reply while reading yours.) Whether this counts as acausal communication is a subtle question though, because unlike in my thought experiment, the mind you ‘spin up’ is informed by you, rather than background properties of the world( which for the sake of argument we can take to be known a priori. Alternatively, see my reply to Mitchell Porter for a contrived way you could end up in possession of this information. ).
Maybe you could spin up a mind which you have theoretical reasons to think would arise in a universe you’re interested in understanding, in which case you might want to simulate part of that universe as well. But this seems to suggest that there is no information transfer from the simulated universe to you. However, what if the simulation is simpler than the universe of which it is a simulation, in a way which can be shown not to have any effect on its outputs? Now the situation is closer to what I described in my post. I think it’s reasonable to talk about communication occurring here because you gain knowledge you didn’t have before about the other universe, by interacting with something which isn’t that universe itself. Data about that universe was already within yours, in that it would have been possible for Laplace’s demon to observe you in your universe and predict what you were going to do, and what you would observe when you simulated the other universe, but data and information are not exactly the same thing, at least in the way I’m using them here. You gain information about the other universe in this case, because you are not Laplace’s demon.
I don’t know whether I’ve given you what you were looking for here, but hopefully it clarified the disagreement. I would repeat that I think you’re certainly correct if your definition of communication includes causality. Although, another important point that comes to my mind here is that it can be difficult to define things like causality and information transfer other than in terms of the start and end points of processes and correlleations between them, which are present in this scenario.
Thanks for your engagement and in-depth reply.
You say :”The main point is this: by merely imagining that I want to make a trade, I have narrowed the class of entities I can trade with from “all plausible entities” to “entities who would accept the trade I want to make” I honestly don’t see how this is relevant to my question.
My question was not ‘is it possible to answer questions by spinning up minds who know the answers to those questions?’ , which seems to be how you’ve interpreted it. Nonetheless, that question is certainly an interesting one, and I’m not completely sure I agree with your answer to it, because of computational irreducibility. Just because you’re uncertain of something, this does not mean that you cannot increase your certainty about it without ‘causal communication with things around you’ (i.e. observation), because sometimes simply thinking in more depth about it can help you to resolve logical uncertainty. Perhaps you could do this by ‘spinning up’ a mind. (After I read further I realized you already pointed this out. Sorry about that. I was writing my reply while reading yours.) Whether this counts as acausal communication is a subtle question though, because unlike in my thought experiment, the mind you ‘spin up’ is informed by you, rather than background properties of the world( which for the sake of argument we can take to be known a priori. Alternatively, see my reply to Mitchell Porter for a contrived way you could end up in possession of this information. ).
Maybe you could spin up a mind which you have theoretical reasons to think would arise in a universe you’re interested in understanding, in which case you might want to simulate part of that universe as well. But this seems to suggest that there is no information transfer from the simulated universe to you. However, what if the simulation is simpler than the universe of which it is a simulation, in a way which can be shown not to have any effect on its outputs? Now the situation is closer to what I described in my post. I think it’s reasonable to talk about communication occurring here because you gain knowledge you didn’t have before about the other universe, by interacting with something which isn’t that universe itself. Data about that universe was already within yours, in that it would have been possible for Laplace’s demon to observe you in your universe and predict what you were going to do, and what you would observe when you simulated the other universe, but data and information are not exactly the same thing, at least in the way I’m using them here. You gain information about the other universe in this case, because you are not Laplace’s demon.
I don’t know whether I’ve given you what you were looking for here, but hopefully it clarified the disagreement. I would repeat that I think you’re certainly correct if your definition of communication includes causality. Although, another important point that comes to my mind here is that it can be difficult to define things like causality and information transfer other than in terms of the start and end points of processes and correlleations between them, which are present in this scenario.