On Mon, 6 Sep 1999, david gobel wrote:
> > Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:.. there's.. at least a 50% chance of this being...
> > a 100% probability. My intuitions, though, tell me that this Universe
> > is real down to the quark level, which I don't think would be necessary
> > if this were a simulation.
> I answered this question to my own satisfaction in 1994 when our first
> Worlds program actually worked...
> The answer is: a virtual world is an actual world under all conditions
> where the simulated cognitives are unaware that their world is a
> simulation.
To put it another way. Whether our universe is implemented using 'real' matter or a software emulation is irrelevant for the level of 'realness'.
If all of it turned out to be a software emulation, it would just mean reality was implemented in another way than we thought it was. The universe wouldn't become any less real.
Rik
-- The Internet is not a network of computers. It is a network of people. That is its real strength. -- work at: http://www.reseau.nl/ home at: http://www.nl.linux.org/~riel/