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Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

If I have a 9-DOF sensor in meatspace and am feeding that to a "simulation" that helps a PID coalesce faster then my simulation can move something. When I tell my computer to simulate blackbody radiation...

What you said sounds good, but I don't think it's philosophically robust.

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I think you misunderstood my point. A simulation is never the actual simulated phenomenon. When you understand consciousness as a "physical" phenomenon (e.g. as in most forms of panprotopsychism), believing in being able to create it by computation is like believing in being able to generate gravity by computation.

we're out of my wheelhouse but it feels to me that entropy and gravity are fundamentally linked and a quick search shows i'm not alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity

read this as: literally creating gravity by simulating it hard enough.

I don't see how computation itself can be a plausible cause here. The physical representation of the computation might be the cause, but the computation itself is not substrate-independent in its possible effect. That is again my point.

I'm arguing with an AI about this too, because my firm belief is that the act of changing a 1 to a 0 in a computer must radiate heat - a 1 is a voltage, it's not an abstract "idea", so that "power" has to go somewhere. It radiates out.

I'm not really arguing with you, i just think if i simulate entropy (entropic processes, "CSRNG", whatever) on my computer ...

I agree and the radiation/physical effect is in my opinion the only possibility a normal computer may somehow be able to cause some kind of consciousness.

wow, we were at an impasse, but somehow i managed to make myself understood. Happy Mardi Gras!

> A simulation is never the actual simulated phenomenon.

That's not obviously true, especially given how the more we keep digging into physics, the more everything seems to be "just information".

Seems to me like wishful thinking. This would require an interface to connect to and there we are most probably in the physical realm again (what we can perceive as such).

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