What do you mean by “knows the state of the simulation”? What is the point of this exercise?
Yes the machine running the simulation knows the current state of the simulation at any given point (ignoring fully homomorphic encryption). It must however forget this intermediate state when the computation is reversed, including any copies/checkpoints it has. Otherwise we’re not talking about a reversible process. Do we agree on this point?
My original post was:
Giving answers is an irreversible operation. The whole “is a fully reversible computer conscious?” thing doesn’t really make sense to me—for the computer to actually have an effect on the world requires irreversible outputs. So I have trouble imagiing scenarios where my expectactions are different but the entire process remains reversible...
How does your setup of a simulated person performing mathmatics, then being forgotten as the simulation is run backwards address this concern?
I disagree that “giving answers is an irreversible operation”. My setup explicitly doesn’t “forget” the calculation (the calculation being simulating someone proving the Riemann hypothesis, and us extracting that proof from the simulation), and my setup is explicitly reversible (because we have the full density matrix of the system at all times, and can in principle perform unitary time evolution backwards from the final state if we wanted to).
Nothing is ever being forgotten. I’m not sure where that came from, because I’ve never claimed that anything is being forgotten at any step. I’m not sure why you’re insisting that things be forgotten to satisfy reversibility, either.
What do you mean by “knows the state of the simulation”? What is the point of this exercise?
Yes the machine running the simulation knows the current state of the simulation at any given point (ignoring fully homomorphic encryption). It must however forget this intermediate state when the computation is reversed, including any copies/checkpoints it has. Otherwise we’re not talking about a reversible process. Do we agree on this point?
My original post was:
How does your setup of a simulated person performing mathmatics, then being forgotten as the simulation is run backwards address this concern?
I disagree that “giving answers is an irreversible operation”. My setup explicitly doesn’t “forget” the calculation (the calculation being simulating someone proving the Riemann hypothesis, and us extracting that proof from the simulation), and my setup is explicitly reversible (because we have the full density matrix of the system at all times, and can in principle perform unitary time evolution backwards from the final state if we wanted to).
Nothing is ever being forgotten. I’m not sure where that came from, because I’ve never claimed that anything is being forgotten at any step. I’m not sure why you’re insisting that things be forgotten to satisfy reversibility, either.