ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with a discussion of some ideas from the contemporary debate about content externalism in the philosophy of mind, as well as some others from the phenomenological tradition, about what sorts of assumptions are involved in the classification of human experiences into broad, general types. This culminates in the formulation of a highly schematic, conjunctive criterion for something’s counting as a simulated human experience. Some brief clarificatory remarks follow about a couple of the less intuitive notions used in this formulation (specifically, what it means for two experiences to qualify as similar in content and what it means for an experience to be accessible to a thinking agent). I then go on to compare the account of simulation just given to those developed by Jean Baudrillard (in Simulacra and Simulation ) Nick Bostrom (in “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”) and several philosophers (notably Robert Gordon and Justin C. Fisher) who have contributed to the current debate about simulationism in the philosophy of mind.
