simulate
English, from Latin · simulare · ˈsɪmjʊleɪt
A simulation is a made likeness. Whether a made likeness of a mind is a mind is the whole trouble of the word.
- similis
- like, resembling
- simulare
- to make like, to feign, to copy the appearance of
Morphology
Latin simulare, to make like, from similis, like. The verb can mean to copy, to feign, or to put on an appearance. English simulation inherits both the workshop sense (a model that behaves like) and the older moral sense (a pretence). The computational use is late. It does not cancel the older trouble: likeness is not identity.
Semantic range
To feign; to model; to run a likeness of a process; in public talk, to inhabit a made world.
History of the word
Engineers simulate weather, flight, and circuits without claiming the model is the storm. Nick Bostrom’s 2003 paper (draft 2001) asks a different question: if many high-fidelity ancestor simulations exist, most observers like us would be in one. That is a counting argument, not a detection. It assumes substrate independence: that a mind can run on other stuff and still be a mind. Descartes’s deceiver (1641) asked whether experience could be systematically false. Konrad Zuse’s Calculating Space (1969) asked whether physics itself is computation. Philip K. Dick, at Metz in 1977, said we are living in a computer-programmed reality. These are not one origin. Popular speech now compresses them into a hypothesis. The argument and the hypothesis are not the same office.
A timeline of usage
- simulare: to make like, to feign
- Descartes: an evil demon could falsify appearance
- Zuse: the universe as computation (digital physics, not a bet we are NPCs)
- Dick at Metz: a computer-programmed reality, in a gnostic key
- Putnam: brains in a vat
- Bostrom: a trilemma about ancestor simulations
- Public odds, stages, feeds. Compression, not origin.
A key source
Nick Bostrom
“Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003): 243–255. Draft 2001.
Associated traditions
Parallels, not equivalents. Different attempts to notice something about knowing.
Greek
mimēsis
Imitation in art and nature. Plato’s concern is the good, not processors.
Sanskrit
māyā
Appearance, making, sometimes illusion. Not a GPU.
A distant linguistic echo
māyā
Sanskrit · A different tradition’s word for appearance and making. Analogy, not lineage.
How the word shifts
In a laboratory, to simulate is to model. In a feed, to simulate is to inhabit a fake. The slide from model to world is how a paper became a bet.
fake world
The older sense of making-like, and the open question of whether likeness of function is likeness of experience.
A story where the word matters
- One Thread Among ManyA stage in California, then the feed · 2016, among other dates
- The Imitation GameManchester, on the page of Mind · 1950
- The Fire and the WallAthens · c. 375 BCE
- Once He Dreamed He Was a ButterflyThe state of Song, traditionally · c. 4th century BCE
- The Circular RuinsA temple the story will not locate · 1940
- The Door with a Seam of ColorA gray room that does not exist · 1982
Nearby words
Neighbors, not translations of one concept.
From this word
If a simulation can copy behavior, what would count as evidence that it also copies experience?
One question remains
What does this word let us notice that English “consciousness” does not?
It lets us notice that English named the computational worry with a verb of likeness, not a verb of being.