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Comment by swid | Hacker News Reader

I meant something else. If you can perfectly simulate a rock, as it exists in reality, you can also simulate a brain. The universe doesn’t care that the brain produces thoughts.

Thoughts are an emergent property of the network, there is no rule in the universe to treat the brain different. So if we think we can simulate matter, with sufficiently close behavior to reality, than that is already sufficient to produce AGI, and none of the code will look like it provides thinking… it will just look like math/physics.

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But we can't perfectly simulate a rock, or a nuclear reaction. Perfect is an extremely high bar here.

It would probably be difficult to simulate a rock sufficiently well to fool someone with the combined skills of a geologist & 3D graphic designer.

I'm not suggesting we can do this today (no universal theory), and I'm not suggesting it is practical in the sense that we can simulate that much amount of matter in a certain amount of time. But I think it's theoretically possible.

There is also the question about how much simulation would be necessary to get approximately real life results that includes consciousness -There was a very detailed simulation of a cell[1], I think that used a library of known chemical interactions. This is not the way the universe works, but such an approach might still simulate life, including people, with enough running time.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-complete-simulation-of-a...

> But I think it's theoretically possible.

That's an unsubstantiated belief, though.

If we simulate a rock right down to the quantum level - not even remotely possible with foreseeable technology, but let's assume it is - you don't end up with an actual rock in the physical universe. You end up with a model of a rock. There are important properties that it's missing due to not having a direct physical embodiment beyond its model. You can't bash someone in the head with it in the physical world, for example.

In the consciousness case, you're assuming you can "get around this" by using communication between the model and the host universe - communication could allow a model a way to have an effect beyond its host environment, unlike the simulated rock.

But this involves a lot of assumptions about the nature of consciousness, its physical basis, how a model of consciousness would behave, etc. Given the number of unknowns here, the claim that "it's theoretically possible" is supported just as well as the claim that it's theoretically impossible - which is to say, not at all.

> You can't bash someone in the head with it in the physical world, for example.

You can bash someone in the head with it in the simulated world though, and if you simulate that person's head well enough it will be just as painful for them as it would be for a real world person.

That's tautological. We are using the thought experiment of a simulated rock to reason our way into simulated consciousness. Therefore you cannot presuppose a simulated rock to induce pain-- a property of consciousness-- before you have properly established the simulated rock. Otherwise you are saying "I know we can simulate consciousness (via simated pain) because we can simaulate the rock. And I know we can simulate the rock because it causes simulated pain (which requires consciousness)." Tautology.

That's not how I read this thread at all. What GP is saying seems to be that when you assume you're able to simulate matter and physical processes down to nuclear level (so you can "simulate a rock" with it), it would be only a matter of giving that simulation enough resources in order for it to be able to simulate a conscious being.

How do you know you're not simulated yourself? Whether we live in a simulation or not does not really have any influence on us and our consciousnesses.

Theoretically, perhaps.

But keep in mind that a simulation is, well, a simulation. Artificial consciousness may be possible. It may also be possible to simulate something with a surface appearance indistinguishable from consciousness but not actually be consciousness, while actual consciousness would require very different methods.

When thinking about these things we have to draw a line between something that can fool gross human perception and something that is actually conscious. Right now we don't even know enough to know what the tools required to make such a determination would look like. It may very well be that, from an ethical standpoint, we'll need to ascribe consciousness to systems for year or decades before we're able to determine if it's real or the equivalent of a very convincing optical illusion.

This question is like asking if a soul exists. I don’t think it does. I think, the state of brain gives way to us feeling alive. There is nothing special in there that happens outside of the physical reality. So by this view, simulating a person does indeed produce consciousness.

Another (unsubstantiated) way of looking at it is that the universe is a kind of computer already, which we seek to emulate. We are already running on a computer if the universe can be considered one.

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