Maybe I’ve missed something in your original article or your comments, but I don’t understand why you think a person in a perfect physics simulation of the universe would feel differently enough about the qualia he or she experiences to notice a difference. Qualia are probably a physical phenomenon, yes—but if that physical phenomenon is simulated in exact detail, how can a simulated person tell the difference? Feelings about qualia are themselves qualia, and those qualia are also simulated by the physics simulator. Imagine for a moment, that some superbeing was able to determine the exact physical laws and initial conditions of this universe, and then construct a Turing machine that simulated our universe based on those rules and inital conditions. Or for argument’s sake, imagine instead that the intial conditions plugged into the simulation were the state of the universe an hour before you wrote this article. At what point would the simulation and the real world diverge? If this world were the simulation, would the simulated you still have written this article? If so, then what’s the difference between the “you” in the two universes? You’ve argued in your post that your experiences would be noticably different—but if you’re not acting on that difference, then what is this “you”, exactly, and why can’t it affect your actions? Or is there no such “you”—and in which case, how would the simulated you differ from a “zombie”? And how do you know there is such a “you”, here and now? If the simulated you would not have written this article—well, then either there’s something about qualia that can’t be simulated, in which case qualia are not physical… or the physics simulation is imperfect, in which case it’s not a perfect simulator by your definition, and if so why not?
Maybe I’ve missed something in your original article or your comments, but I don’t understand why you think a person in a perfect physics simulation of the universe would feel differently enough about the qualia he or she experiences to notice a difference. Qualia are probably a physical phenomenon, yes—but if that physical phenomenon is simulated in exact detail, how can a simulated person tell the difference? Feelings about qualia are themselves qualia, and those qualia are also simulated by the physics simulator. Imagine for a moment, that some superbeing was able to determine the exact physical laws and initial conditions of this universe, and then construct a Turing machine that simulated our universe based on those rules and inital conditions. Or for argument’s sake, imagine instead that the intial conditions plugged into the simulation were the state of the universe an hour before you wrote this article. At what point would the simulation and the real world diverge? If this world were the simulation, would the simulated you still have written this article? If so, then what’s the difference between the “you” in the two universes? You’ve argued in your post that your experiences would be noticably different—but if you’re not acting on that difference, then what is this “you”, exactly, and why can’t it affect your actions? Or is there no such “you”—and in which case, how would the simulated you differ from a “zombie”? And how do you know there is such a “you”, here and now? If the simulated you would not have written this article—well, then either there’s something about qualia that can’t be simulated, in which case qualia are not physical… or the physics simulation is imperfect, in which case it’s not a perfect simulator by your definition, and if so why not?