Can somebody remember that paper on how a computer simulation could help explain various strange phenomena such as finite light speed, quantum uncertainty, and the like..?

Anyway, how bizarre, soluble philosophical questions:

Quote Originally Posted by Meakel View Post
1. We now have a perfect record of human history. What do we do about things unsolved crimes, the wrongly accused?
Firstly an aside that this is impossible, by which I mean that getting the information about the start of the universe would be even harder than getting local information about the present universe. Anyway, we let them out I suppose? The film 'Minority Report' is kinda about such a system, though the success rate isn't perfect and it sees the future not the past. You couldn't incriminate anybody from the future with this because you're constantly changing the future when you use the machine to arrest people that wouldn't have been otherwise, and this is important because one would imagine such an omniscient device would cause crime to fall much lower than it would otherwise have been.

2. Doesn't the existence of this program and it's 'predictions' prove a sort of scientific determinism?
Well it doesn't take much analysis to see why this argument is flawed: in order to know that the program 'exists', you'd first have to know the universe is deterministic. Otherwise it can't be emulated algorithmically in the first place. And this may well be the case; most physicists interpret quantum weirdness as showing that the universe is inherently probabilistic.

3. The computer at some point would then also predict it's own creation and thus must have a programming copy of itself run a copy of itself which would run a copy of itself...etc. This actually would probably make the thing explode or something...which I guess solves question 2. Hahaha.
Clearly there's something wrong here, because any program contains finite information. The error is that the universe you simulate will have a loss in fidelity (as you can't use every particle in existence to run the simulation), meaning you need more and more matter in each simulation to simulate the same thing.

4. All matter is accounted for and represented in this program down to the atomic level. Doesn't this mean that the sentient beings are actually sentient. If done properly, these programmed beings could see and hear the same way we do. The only difference being that they are lines of code. But are they really? What would seperate us from them? Isn't the universe essentially just a set of laws and rules, like a program?
This is a major and problematic issue in philosophy of mind. I feel compelled to say yes; I think the people who say 'no' (see the 'China brain' thought experiment) are erroneously forgetting that the soul is not some kind of perfect, detached object. The 'soul' (let's say 'consciousness' to be more precise and scientific) arises from processes in the brain which are emulated in our neurons. It seems absurd to suggest that the water and protein and fats and ions et. al. are the necessary factor for consciousness; the sensible solution is that it is the processes themselves, regardless of how they are physically embodied (a brain made of neurons, or of wooden parts, or of silicon microchips), are what is important.