How To Create An Emulation?

First, I paraphrase the omniscient narrator of Poul Anderson's Genesis (New York, 2001), pp. 144-145.

(i) Consider a three dimensional environment and its living inhabitants at a single instant.

(ii) At this instant, each part of the whole is in a single state, therefore the whole is.

(iii) The state in the succeeding instant follows from the state in the first instant in accordance with natural laws.

(iv) Represent each variable in the first state by a set of numbers.

(v) Input natural laws.

(vi) Run the program.

(vii) The computer model evolves in exact correspondence with our world...

(viii) ...including life and consciousness.

(ix) The maps of organisms go through one-to-one analogues of everything that the organisms would, including sensation and thought.

(x) To them, they and their world are the same as in the original.

(xi) It is meaningless to ask which is more real.

Now, I comment:

(i)-(vii) are unobjectionable but (viii)-(xi) are wrong. There is no life or consciousness inside a computer model of the world any more than there is inside a novel about fictitious events in the world or indeed inside a historical/biographical account of real events in the world. Some artifact might be able to emulate consciousness but, if so, that artifact will have to be something more or other than a computer, something able to duplicate, not merely simulate, the effects inside brains of the activities of mobile organisms with central nervous systems interacting with an environment.

Anderson's narrator goes on to acknowledge that his "...primitive account is false." (p. 145) However, he does not address the objection raised here. He does say that:

Gaia lacks the data and capability to model the universe or even just Earth;
atom-by-atom modeling is impossible so approximations must suffice;
chaos and quantum uncertainty prevent precise prediction.

These points are valid.

Before beginning his account, the narrator had described it as a "...myth..." (p. 144) to say that the conscious Christian Brannock subroutine was downloaded into the Gaian computer. To describe the reality would require wave mechanical mathematics and the "...concept of a multi-leveled, mutably dimensioned reality..." that superhuman minds had needed "...a long time to work out." (ibid.) But, if the reality is greater and different, then why use the computer myth?

A reality with many levels and a number of dimensions? That is comprehensible so far. But a changeable number of dimensions? Could a square become a cube, then revert to being a square? Wave mechanical mathematics loses me. I am fascinated by the philosophy of mathematics but have no aptitude for mathematics.