[kstar]

Originally Posted by Superman

I love this kind of stuff and would like to take this theory seriously but there's a problem. Consciousness. I could easily imagine programming an entire world full of people and history and ancestors, etc. But I can't accept that the characters in the program are given consciousness. Their lives might be viewable or even experienceable, but they don't get their own consciousness.

It is argued here that "consciousness" is a function of adequate computing power:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

Excerpt 1:

Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race

Excerpt 2:

Such a mature stage of technological development will make it possible to convert planets and other astronomical resources into enormously powerful computers. It is currently hard to be confident in any upper bound on the computing power that may be available to posthuman civilizations. As we are still lacking a “theory of everything”, we cannot rule out the possibility that novel physical phenomena, not allowed for in current physical theories, may be utilized to transcend those constraints[2] that in our current understanding impose theoretical limits on the information processing attainable in a given lump of matter. We can with much greater confidence establish lower bounds on posthuman computation, by assuming only mechanisms that are already understood. For example, Eric Drexler has outlined a design for a system the size of a sugar cube (excluding cooling and power supply) that would perform 10^21 instructions per second.[3] Another author gives a rough estimate of 10^42 operations per second for a computer with a mass on order of a large planet.[4] (If we could create quantum computers, or learn to build computers out of nuclear matter or plasma, we could push closer to the theoretical limits. Seth Lloyd calculates an upper bound for a 1 kg computer of 5*10^50 logical operations per second carried out on ~10^31 bits.[5] However, it suffices for our purposes to use the more conservative estimate that presupposes only currently known design-principles.)The amount of computing power needed to emulate a human mind can likewise be roughly estimated. One estimate, based on how computationally expensive it is to replicate the functionality of a piece of nervous tissue that we have already understood and whose functionality has been replicated in silico, contrast enhancement in the retina, yields a figure of ~10^14 operations per second for the entire human brain.[6] An alternative estimate, based the number of synapses in the brain and their firing frequency, gives a figure of ~10^16-10^17 operations per second.[7] Conceivably, even more could be required if we want to simulate in detail the internal workings of synapses and dentritic trees. However, it is likely that the human central nervous system has a high degree of redundancy on the mircoscale to compensate for the unreliability and noisiness of its neuronal components. One would therefore expect a substantial efficiency gain when using more reliable and versatile non-biological processors


The FAQ is interesting as well, and touches on Descartes:

source: http://www.simulation-argument.com/faq.html

3. Is the simulation argument a variant of Descartes' daemon or the brain-in-a-vat argument?

No, the simulation argument is fundamentally different from these traditional philosophical arguments (as explained in my reply to Brian Weatherson). The purpose of the simulation argument is different: not to set up a skeptical problem as a challenge to epistemological theories and common sense, but rather to argue that we have interesting empirical reasons to believe that a certain disjunctive claim about the world is true (that is, (1)v(2)v(3)). The Simulation argument relies crucially on non-obvious empirical premises about future technological abilities. And the conclusion of the Simulation argument is not simply that we cannot be certain that we are not living in a simulation. If we knew that fSIM (the faction of all human-like beings who are simulated) was very small but non-zero, we might not be able to be completely certain that we are not in a simulation, but this would not be a very interesting contention. (If we think that somewhere in our infinite universe there are a few “envatted brains”, then maybe we shouldn’t assign a strictly zero credence to us being envatted brains either, but so long as we thought that the proportion of brains in vats to brains in crania was small enough, we would have no ground for seriously doubting that we are not brains in vats, at least if we lacked specific evidence to the contrary). The Simulation argument is also different from ordinary brain-in-a-vat arguments in that it doesn’t begin from a starting point of doubt and ask for some compelling reason for canceling that doubt. Rather, it begins from the starting point that things are the way we believe they are, and then, while granting us that we might be justified in assigning a high initial credence to these beliefs, nevertheless tries to show that we have specific empirically-grounded reasons for revising these initial beliefs in a certain way – not so as to make us generally agnostic about the existence of an external world, but to accept the disjunctive conclusion. Thus, the Simulation argument is not best thought of as a skeptical argument that would have us be more agnostic, but rather as an argument that would have us increase our credence in one particular disjunction (and decrease our credence in its negation). It aims to tell us something about the world rather than to advise us that we know less about the world than we thought we did.

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FYI.

Best,

Kurt