“My own sense of how to behave in a simulation has more traditional roots in the theory of perception. I’ve long believed that each of us lives in an egocentric simulation of the world run by the mind/brain. Since the zombies of each (waking) simulation have sentient real world counterparts, one should treat them as though they were real. Nonetheless as an angst-ridden teenager, my dawning acceptance of an inferential realist theory of perception made me feel as if I’d been condemned to solitary confinement for life. The sense of loneliness was indescribable. Naïve realism is better for one’s mental health.”

— David Pearce (philosopher)

" Origins and Theory of the World Transhumanist Association https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/bostrom20071226", Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Dec. 2007

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David Pearce (philosopher) 28

British transhumanist 1959

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“One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of the car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

"Is the Brain’s Mind a Computer Program?", Scientific American (January 1990).

“For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

“To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary."”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

The Precession of Simulcra, The Divine Irreference Of Images
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“To an increasing number of practitioners, computer simulations rooted in mathematics represent a third way of doing science, alongside theory and experiment.”

Ivars Peterson (1948) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Mathematical Tourist: New and Updated Snapshots of Modern Mathematics (1998), Chapter 1, “Explorations” (p. 10)

“Gods reappear in unlimited numbers in the guise of the simulators who have the power of life and death over the simulated realities that they bring into being. The simulators determine the laws, and can change the laws, that govern their worlds. They can engineer anthropic fine-tunings. They can pull the plug on the simulation at any moment, intervene or distance themselves from their simulation; watch as the simulated creatures argue about whether there is a god who controls or intervenes, work miracles or impose their ethical principles upon the simulated reality.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

"Glitch," New Scientist (June 7, 2003)

“The main object of cybernetics is to supply adaptive, hierarchical models, involving feedback and the like, to all aspects of our environment. Often such modelling implies simulation of a system where the simulation should achieve the object of copying both the method of achievement and the end result. Synthesis, as opposed to simulation, is concerned with achieving only the end result and is less concerned (or completely unconcerned) with the method by which the end result is achieved. In the case of behaviour, psychology is concerned with simulation, while cybernetics, although also interested in simulation, is primarily concerned with synthesis.
Most of the major developments in models and theories of artificial intelligence have taken place in the western world — mostly, indeed, in the US and Britain — and it was only relatively recently that "core developments", as opposed to more peripheral developments and applications, have spread over Europe and the Soviet Union.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

George (1973) "Soviet Cybernetics, the militairy and Professor Lerner" in: New Scientist (March 15, 1973). Vol. 57, nr. 837. p. 613

“You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.”

Thomas Bernhard book Woodcutters

Source: Woodcutters

“[T]he existence of the mind-independent environment beyond one's world-simulation is a theoretical inference, not an empirical observation.”

David Pearce (philosopher) (1959) British transhumanist

Postscript to review https://www.hedweb.com/lockwood.htm of Michael Lockwood's Mind, Brain and the Quantum, BLTC Research, Dec. 2016

“Simulation systems (mathematical models, philosophical thought experiments) that don’t have real world applications are like SPACs - shells with all the paperwork in place till something operational is ready to merge into them.”

Anand Gandhi (1980) Indian film director

“Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene

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