Consciousness Part 5
Assume we're living in a simulation, as Scott Adams and Elon Musk believe. If you're authoring our simulation, you probably don't care much about where individual memories are stored. We can assume you're either running the simulation to learn something or for entertainment (or both), and you only care about results. As Elon Musk says from his simulation viewpoint: "Most entertaining outcome is most likely" (source).
In fact, it might be an optimization to kill off actors entirely, preserving only their external impact as remembered by other actors in the simulation. This would free up enormous amounts of memory and remove useless detail.
However, as an actor in this simulation, I do care deeply about my memories—they constitute my identity. I've been programmed to want to preserve that identity. Sure, there are some things I'd rather forget, but generally I value my sense of continuity. It's what makes me, me.
(This relates to the "Ship of Theseus" question: if a boat gradually has all its parts replaced, is it still the same boat? Yes, it is! This is called the "Continuity View," and while other philosophical views exist, they're wrong—at least for this discussion.)
The Missing Element: Save Files
As a game developer who has worked in offline and online worlds for 35 years, I'm familiar with what it means to run a simulation. One key factor that Scott Adams and Elon Musk seem to have overlooked is the importance of the save file. When people discuss living in a simulation (including in books like Neal Stephenson's "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell"), they typically assume the simulation works like physics—one event leads naturally to the next.
But that need not be the case.
Time as Illusion
Time itself might be an illusion. Our lives as actors in the simulation could be time-sliced with everyone else's. Maybe we're only simulating ourselves 1/100th of the time, while 99/100ths of the time we're "off." (In most game simulations, the time spent active or inactive varies depending on computational load.)
You could be turned off for minutes—and perhaps experience it as daydreaming, those random thoughts unrelated to your life's purpose. This would serve as a cover story, and you wouldn't even need to be in a running state for the daydreaming to occur. When you're unpaused, a memory of daydreaming could simply be inserted to account for the missing time.
Sleep could be a much larger version of this phenomenon. But it gets worse (or better): you could be turned off for an entire day without knowing it, then have a vague memory of being sick implanted to cover the gap.
Editing Reality
While you're paused, your save file could be edited. Nothing requires the simulation of all these actors to be consistent. When consistency matters for the simulation's purpose, a "rendezvous" (in Ada) or "channel" (in Go) could synchronize state between actors. Perhaps these connections are created automatically when two actors are physically close to each other. Most of our information about nearly everything else is hearsay anyway.
The Manufactured Past
This means the past could be as much an illusion as the present. Just as some fundamentalist Christians believe the entire world was created 8,000 years ago complete with dinosaur bones embedded in the Earth, our lives as we know them might have started 10 milliseconds ago, with our personal history and sense of continuity restored from a modified save file.
So...
What was I saying?