“What we see visually is not present inside of the tissue of our brain. It is not a physical phenomenon, or rather physics is actually a subset of a much larger psycho-physical context of nature. Unlike a computer simulation, which relies completely on a physical video screen to accomplish any sense of simulation, the brain contains no screen, no graphics card, no staging area where graphic images are put together for final consumption by a user.

Because video screens and GUIs are not computer software or hardware, but are instead sensory stimulation devices which utilize physical-somatic phenomena rather than logical functions, we should not attribute any sort of simulation capacities to computers. Computers cannot simulate anything, computers count physical events by storing and comparing physical events…uniform, generic, artificially conditioned events. Simulation can only ever occur by, for, and within conscious experience. Natural consciousness – not emergent properties presumed to transform abstract concepts like digital values into concrete perceptions like the flavor of sweetness.

So where does this leave us? Well, I think that we have to turn the whole thing around. We have to pivot to an anti-simulation ontology and realize that our naive experience is as real and fundamental as any other, it just seems less real than we would expect. Ironically, that expectation of realism is actually the simulation. It is physics and math which are holograms that exist in our intellectual imagination, while nature itself is composed entirely of nested perceptual experience. There is no ‘thing’ out there which is more real than we are, we just have unrealistic expectations about what ‘real’ should be.”

I’ve been reading a lot of Craig Weinberg’s stuff lately. The above passage comes from a Quora answer he wrote concerning simulation theory and computationalism.

Tags:computationalismCraig Weinbergontologyphilosohy of mindsimulation theory