On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 10:05 PM, <spudboy...@aol.com> wrote: > Understood, Jason. I became familiar with this digital universe concept, > first, through Hans Moravec, in Mind Children. I wonder how possible it is > to discover that we are part of an ancestor simulation? >
If computationalism is true then it is in principal impossible to rule out being in a simulation, so we could never disprove it. However, it may be possible to find strong evidence for our existence in a simulation. If the simulators wanted to reveal this fact to us they could make it pretty convincing. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ for a nice story and example. Yet, I also think every conscious experience has an infinite number of explanations/incarnations, some fraction of which are due to simulations. So in a sense, we all already exist in a simulations (to varying degrees, as different entities might have a greater fraction of their explanations be simulations). Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.