In general, I expect these sorts of constraint removals to make problems trivial, with exceptions being problems where you have to arbitrarily maintain a finite computational power, and a big problem of philosophy is not realizing how much their intuitions rests on constraints of our own world that don’t have to hold when infinity is involved.
More generally, a lot of our intuitions involve exploiting constraints on the world at large, which means that when you remove those constraints, our intuitions become false.
I think Searle’s Chinese Room argument is flawed for reasons similar to this, and more generally the use of idealizations/thought experiments make philosophers forget how wrong their intuition is when they consider the question (at least for non-moral and possibly non-identity cases, though I am much more fragile on the confidence of the non-identity case specifically.
I don’t think any of the challenges you mentioned would be a blocker to aliens that have infinite compute and infinite time. “Is the data big-endian or little-endian?” Well, try it both ways and see which one is a better fit to observations. If neither seems to fit, then do a combinatorial listing of every one of the astronomical number of possible encoding schemes, and check them all! Spend a trillion years studying the plausibility of each possible encoding before moving onto the next one, just to make sure you don’t miss any subtelty. Why not? You can do all sorts of crazy things with infinite compute and infinite time.
Ah I see, thanks for clarifying.
Perhaps I should have also given the alien access to infinite compute. I think the alien still wouldn’t be able to determine the correct simulation.
And also infinite X if you hit me with another bottleneck of the alien not having enough X in practice.
The thought experiment is intended to be about in-principle rather than practical.
In general, I expect these sorts of constraint removals to make problems trivial, with exceptions being problems where you have to arbitrarily maintain a finite computational power, and a big problem of philosophy is not realizing how much their intuitions rests on constraints of our own world that don’t have to hold when infinity is involved.
More generally, a lot of our intuitions involve exploiting constraints on the world at large, which means that when you remove those constraints, our intuitions become false.
I think Searle’s Chinese Room argument is flawed for reasons similar to this, and more generally the use of idealizations/thought experiments make philosophers forget how wrong their intuition is when they consider the question (at least for non-moral and possibly non-identity cases, though I am much more fragile on the confidence of the non-identity case specifically.
I don’t think any of the challenges you mentioned would be a blocker to aliens that have infinite compute and infinite time. “Is the data big-endian or little-endian?” Well, try it both ways and see which one is a better fit to observations. If neither seems to fit, then do a combinatorial listing of every one of the astronomical number of possible encoding schemes, and check them all! Spend a trillion years studying the plausibility of each possible encoding before moving onto the next one, just to make sure you don’t miss any subtelty. Why not? You can do all sorts of crazy things with infinite compute and infinite time.
How would the alien know when they’ve found the correct encoding scheme?