This talk made me feel a lot like one in the audience, an hence made me irritable that I couldn't give my input to the conversation... so here goes:
To the question about choosing between climbing mount Everest in the real world or in a simulation, it strikes me as obvious that (amongst other things) one of the good things about climbing mount Everest, is that you could tell all your friends afterwards that you had done a very hard and dangerous thing
But if you only climbed the mountain as a simulation, you wouldn't get all the respect from your friends, for being courageous, because there wouldn't be any danger associated with it.

But on the other hand, if the sensation of climbing mount Everest would really mean a 100% simulation of how it would feel to do it in real life, then first of all you would also be scared to die in the simulation, and since telling your friends about it afterwards is also a part of the experience, it would also be part of the simulation...
And who says that you would actually survive a tragic accident on the simulated mountain? Note that in The Matrix, we are told that "If the brain dies, the body dies to. The body can't live without the mind".
(But then again; Who said anything about (real) accidents in the simulation? It seems like people here are mostly talking about a virtual narrative, and not actually a virtual world, in which an agent could agt, as in The Matrix for instance).

So there are a lot of uncertainty about how such an if-machine would work, but of course all those questions could just be "if-ed", as Peter Worley calls it, so that's not really a critique.

So I guess my real point here is, that if such a machine would really give you an accurate sensation of the real experience, then it wouldn't be able to do it for just one day, taken out of context. It would have to simulate your entire life, if we are talking about a narrative if-machine.

But if were are talking about a simulated world, as in The Matrix, then you wouldn't climb the Mount Everest in the simulated world, if you wouldn't have done it in the real world, since they are absolutely identical, and therefore the machine would be useless.
(Unless of course you are talking about a kind of a parque-inside-your-house-kind-of-machine, as proposed by a woman in the audience, where it would be to some use, but only because when you walk into the simulation room, you don't get the feeling of being very distant from your house, which you would get in an actual parque. Because if you would actually get that feeling in the simulation, then you would start walking the wrong way home, so to speak... The way to your virtual home. (But then of course, you could just write into the program, that when you start walking towards your virtual home, the simulation would stop, and you(r conscience) would immediately be in your real house again)).

So I guess that my second real point is, that unless we are talking about such type of a machine, it is actually impossible, or pointless, to chose between A and B.


Just a stream of thoughts.
Hope someone will enjoy them.

www.rasmusaagaard.com

Posted by www.rasmusaagaard.com on 20/08/2011 1:01pm