Thank you! And thanks for the reply! I’m very curious to read your piece.
While I can buy that it still exists in the Tegmark 4 sense, I think it still matters whether you keep running it.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “matters,” here. The only sense that I can think of is that it matters in the case that we are to interact with the simulation from the outside; otherwise, not really. I also avoided any discussion of Everettian quantum mechanics precisely because I think it really blows up the scope of it all. I actually believe that, because we’re not quantum computers, Everettian quantum mechanics isn’t important and its effects on us might as well be modeled as random noise in our internal communication channels. In the cellular automaton case, I don’t really see how quantum effects change things, except for the fact that in an insignificant percentage of possible worlds the computer will miscalculate the time evolution of the automaton — and hence whatever it’s calculating will be something other than what we intend.
I happen to think that there is no true reason that your “nows” feel connected — other than the fact that, at each time step, your brain state encodes not just the present moment, but also the recent past, as well as a lot of other information that you may not even be consciously aware of. I think that the tying together of all these individual “nows” into one continuous experience is nothing but an “illusion.” But it’s not like it’s a “helpful illusion” that you evolved; I think it’s almost logically necessary, it’s a consequence of the fact that the brain has short-term memory. What would it mean to say that your “nows” aren’t connected? How could it ever feel to you that they aren’t, unless your short term memory had been screwed with? On the other hand, if I asked you to close your eyes, and I had a magic wand that could freeze your atoms in place, scramble them, then unscramble them back to where they were, and finally unfreeze them, you’d be none the wiser, right? The sense of continuity would be preserved! If instead God did that exact thing to the whole universe, there would be no way for us to tell![1]
I’ve since read Tegmark’s book, and I find it striking that he and I came to very similar worldviews through almost complementary paths. On that note, I actually think that this might be something that he didn’t quite approach in the book (well, kind of). My belief is that subjective experiences are also a kind of mathematical object, and in that sense they’re “disembodied” from the Universes that produce them, even though they also exist as sub-objects of those Universes.[2]
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That is to say, the two descriptions are the same up to isomorphism.
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For instance, the solutions to string theory include the history of the particles that make up my body, which necessarily encompass my subjective experience, but we can also talk about my subjective experience “in its own right”, just like we can talk about all games of chess “in their own right”.
https://claude.ai/share/e1330762-6b46-4185-a09c-b87553d3c975
In an earlier version of the conversation I prompted it it to translate the problem statement into ancient Greek. Then I edited my initial prompt to this version, with the problem statement in ancient Greek.
Did it work?