If our world is information, can it be saved and restored like a game world? To do that requires a decoding context based on our world, which is circular as McCabe explains:
“All our digital simulations need an interpretive context to define what represents what. All these contexts derive from the physical world. Hence the physical world cannot also be the output of such a simulation.” (McCabe, 2005).
The physical world can’t both cause information and be caused by it, so we can’t define information in physical terms then call physical events an information output. This follows from information theory as defined by Shannon and Weaver, but to understand it, imagine our universe frozen at a point in time, as many physical states. What then could load and restart it? A physical state has no information in itself, so who or what could decode it? Not us, as we would be frozen too, along with the universe! A simulation based on physical events can’t create those events as information, as McCabe says, nor can it reload a frozen universe. In contrast, a laptop can save and reload a game, because its operation doesn’t depend on game events in any way.
Matter can’t be information if information depends on matter, so some suggest that minds are information encoded by brains, so emulating a brain would clone it (Sandburg & Bostrom, 2008), so we could copy our mind to a younger body, or live forever as a hologram. Yet there is no evidence at all that computers experience events as minds do. A computer can create a hologram that acts and talks like a dead person, but no-one is there experiencing those events. Emulating a dead relative doesn’t resurrect him or her, any more than a video or photo of them does, so saving and reloading the information of past events doesn’t recreate them.
But if a person’s brain was copied exactly, atom for atom, wouldn’t that copy their consciousness? Nature provides the answer because it has already done it. Identical twins are essentially physical clones of the same egg, but they are different people with different experiences. It follows that a physical clone of me doesn’t make another me, but another person entirely, as I can’t experience their life, nor they mine. Chapter 6 critiques the silicon chip speculation in more detail (6.3.11).
Something is wrong with the idea of reloading reality, and it is the belief that only matter is real. If that was true, a perfect physical copy of me would be another me, but it isn’t. Instead, it is like reloading a game for another player. Even if one day we managed to copy atoms perfectly, cloning a person to another location would create their twin, not them, so if the source atoms remained, there would be two people in two bodies, not one. To really reload a physical event, we must copy what causes it, so can quantum reality be saved and reloaded?