This is voodoo-quantum consciousness: the idea that your mind-identity somehow depends on details down to the quantum state. This can’t possibly be true—because the vast vast majority of that state changes rapidly from quantum moment to moment in a mostly random fashion. There thus is no single quantum state that corresponds uniquely to a mind, rather there is a vast configuration space.
That assumption is not part of my argument. The states of objects outside the people you’re simulating ultimately effect everything else once the changes propagate far enough down the simulation.
You can reduce that space down to a smaller bit representation by removing redundant details. Does it really matter if I remove one molecule from one glial cell in your brain? The whole glial cell? All the glial cells?
Underestimating the importance of glial cells could get you a pretty bad model of the brain. But my point isn’t simply about the thoughts you’d have to simulate; remove one glial cell from a person’s brain, and the gravitational effects mean that if they throw a superball really hard, after enough bounces it’ll end up somewhere entirely different than it would have (calculating the trajectories of superballs is one of the best ways to appreciate the propagation of small changes.)
Who cares?
There could be infinite detail in the universe—we could find that there are entire layers beneath the quantum level, recursing to infinity, such that perfect simulation was impossible in principle .. and it still wouldn’t matter in the slightest.
You only need as much detail in the simulation as . . you want detail in the simulation.
Why would you want as much detail in the simulation as we observe in our reality?
That assumption is not part of my argument. The states of objects outside the people you’re simulating ultimately effect everything else once the changes propagate far enough down the simulation.
Underestimating the importance of glial cells could get you a pretty bad model of the brain. But my point isn’t simply about the thoughts you’d have to simulate; remove one glial cell from a person’s brain, and the gravitational effects mean that if they throw a superball really hard, after enough bounces it’ll end up somewhere entirely different than it would have (calculating the trajectories of superballs is one of the best ways to appreciate the propagation of small changes.)
Why would you want as much detail in the simulation as we observe in our reality?