First published: January 7, 2023
Last revised: November 17, 2024

A simulation consists in encoding some properties of a system into a second system and put rules in place to replicate a subset of the dynamics of the first. Note though that encodings lack the same ontological causality that applies to the real systems that are being simulated, because in a simulation the mechanism that governs the transitions between the encoded states is determined by the an algorithm, not by the ontological nature of the simulacrum. In other words, in order to carry out a simulation all is needed is coordination, not causation.

A common argument for distinguishing a simulation from the thing being simulated is some variation of "you can simulate a bottle of water as well as you desire, but you still can't drink it." This is true, but remember that while many things are different than their description, some others are identical to their description, and so their simulation is as good as the real thing. For example a text file living in my usb stick can be copied and the "original" file is no more special. Any copy is the same, even if it is encoded in a different way and it runs of a different platform. In that case the "thing" is the information, not the substrate on which it lives. Is consciousness identical to its description? If it is, then it's simulable and it doesn't matter which substrate this happens in, but then one runs into the difficulties mentioned in the previous post.

Maintaining that a simulation of consciousness would be conscious needs consciousness to be the same as its description and implies that we could instantiate a consciousness by completely describing it. If this were the case, then Mary the scientist would learn nothing new by seeing red for the first time. This is explored in a slightly different light by V. S. Ramachandran in his book phantoms in the brain. Paraphrasing, he says the problem of qualia could be a problem of language: if it's impossible to communicate my subjective experience through the bottleneck of natural language, what if we could connect our brains through some 'cable' that allows for a different kind of communication? This is an interesting question, but if consciousness were just about information and its processing, then it should not matter how the information is encoded or transmitted, only what information. Therefore, natural language would be sufficient to communicate qualia.