I’m not arguing that a dualism (of this sort) is actually true, merely that we don’t (and can’t) know for a fact that it is false. But if we can’t know for a fact that it is false, then even if we (somehow) knew our reality was simulated, that wouldn’t give us grounds to make confident inferences about the nature of other simulations, or the nature of simulations in themselves
Panpsychists claim everything is conscious, even rocks, even atoms. Again, I don’t claim this is true (I’d be rather shocked if I somehow found out it was), but we can’t know for a fact that it is false. Yet if panpsychism (or at least certain versions thereof) is true, every simulation (even a simulation of the weather, or of crop growth) is conscious, simply because absolutely everything is. But I don’t think most standard definitions of “simulation” are excluding that possibility - on the contrary, they are agnostic with respect to it, treating its truth or falsehood as outside of their scope
It also doesn’t necessarily imply determinism because some computer simulations use RNGs. Most commonly people use pseudorandom RNGs for this, but there is nothing in principle stopping someone from replacing the pseudorandom RNG with a hardware RNG based on some quantum mechanical process, such that it is indeterministic for all practical purposes, and the question of whether it is ultimately deterministic or indeterministic depends on controversial questions about QM to which nobody knows the answers
Roger, that's even better. I tried to clarify the log book idea in another reply.[1] The question is whether you can have reality (from the observer's perspective) just based on whether coherent information exists in any setting.
Basically the question is whether we can go from "I think, therefore I am" to "something is constructing information." The latter is obviously a simpler, lower-level proof than other concepts of existence.
That brings us back to the "something extra." Is it required for our observations to be possible, i.e. can we rule out the log book conjecture? I don't think we can, but I might be wrong.
In that case, the non-conscious people in the log book would spend a lot of time pontificating on their experiences of consciousness and how mysterious it is and whether it's possible for there to be other universes that contain entities like themselves except not conscious. They'd be having these discussions for reasons that have nothing to do with actually being conscious, but coincidentally their statements would perfectly correspond with our actual perceptions of consciousness. Maybe not logically impossible, but it seems extremely improbable.
(This is pretty much the argument at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zo... which I find persuasive).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
Reality is a multi-disciplinary domain, but it gives off the appearance of being physics only, because of its metaphysical nature.