This feels like it’s the same sort of confusion that happens when you try to do Anthropics: ultimately you are the only observer of your own consciousness.
I think you didn’t go far enough. Let’s do some more steps with our scenarios.
Scenario 5: Destroyed data. Lets say we take the stored state from Scenario 4 and obliterate it. Is the simulated person still conscious? This seems like a farcical question at first, but from the perspective of the person, how has the situation changed? There was no perceivable destruction event for them to record at the end, no last updated state where they could see the world turning to dust around them, snap-style.
Scenario 6: Imaginary data. What if we cut out the middleman, and never did any of this at all? We just imagined we might build a big computer and simulate a person. The prospective simulation is based on math. The math itself is still there, even if you don’t compute it. There was never an input channel into the simulation, the simulation can’t see the real world at all, so how can the real world matter to it at all? A chain of causation within it goes all the way back from the end of the simulation to its start, with nothing from the outside in between. How is that less valid than our own universe’s history?
Your own self-observed consciousness anchors you in a specific universe, but once you even begin to think about other, unobservable consciousnesses, you’re suddenly adrift in a stormy sea.
This feels like it’s the same sort of confusion that happens when you try to do Anthropics: ultimately you are the only observer of your own consciousness.
I think you didn’t go far enough. Let’s do some more steps with our scenarios.
Scenario 5: Destroyed data. Lets say we take the stored state from Scenario 4 and obliterate it. Is the simulated person still conscious? This seems like a farcical question at first, but from the perspective of the person, how has the situation changed? There was no perceivable destruction event for them to record at the end, no last updated state where they could see the world turning to dust around them, snap-style.
Scenario 6: Imaginary data. What if we cut out the middleman, and never did any of this at all? We just imagined we might build a big computer and simulate a person. The prospective simulation is based on math. The math itself is still there, even if you don’t compute it. There was never an input channel into the simulation, the simulation can’t see the real world at all, so how can the real world matter to it at all? A chain of causation within it goes all the way back from the end of the simulation to its start, with nothing from the outside in between. How is that less valid than our own universe’s history?
Your own self-observed consciousness anchors you in a specific universe, but once you even begin to think about other, unobservable consciousnesses, you’re suddenly adrift in a stormy sea.