19 ms·

Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

74 points by Artoemius 10y ago

have_faith 10y ago
Morpheus from The Matrix: "What is real? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." Doesn't feel like there's ultimately any way out of this line of reasoning. What would it take to prove to you that you are indeed not in a simulation of some kind? as the only methods of providing proof are also parts of the simulation.
- naasking 10y ago
  > Doesn't feel like there's ultimately any way out of this line of reasoning. What would it take to prove to you that you are indeed not in a simulation of some kind? as the only methods of providing proof are also parts of the simulation. Simulations are just as real. Why wouldn't they be? What makes "natural laws enforced by reality" really any more "real" than "natural laws enforced by a simulation"?
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Well, there were the glitches - the black cat that ran by twice?
  - XorNot 10y ago
    We can look for if lattice QCD was used in the big bang simulation by searching for anomalies magnified during expansion into the cosmic microwave background.
  - have_faith 10y ago
    It took someone from the outside to explain what the deja vu meant though, as there was no way of knowing from the inside that the glitches where a result of a broken simulation of the internal reality.
- amasad 10y ago
  Not only that you can't know for sure that you're not living in a simulation, you actually can't surely tell that you existed before this point in time. Imagine that you are instantiated in a simulation with pre-installed memories that give you the illusion that you existed prior to this point. This line of thought is really old and goes back to Plato (see allegory of the cave) but formalized by Descartes (see evil genius https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon)
  - SubiculumCode 10y ago
    Not a creationist, but a common argument against the earth being only several thousand years old is that star light must have taken much longer to get here given c. However, the simulation of those photons could have begun in transit, as you say.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- naasking 10y ago
  > Doesn't feel like there's ultimately any way out of this line of reasoning. What would it take to prove to you that you are indeed not in a simulation of some kind? as the only methods of providing proof are also parts of the simulation. Simulations are just as real. Why wouldn't they be? What makes "natural laws enforced by reality" really any more "real" than "natural laws enforced by a simulation"?
  - Filligree 10y ago
    Nothing, but the possibility does increase the chance of those laws changing.
  - goatlover 10y ago
    Are simulations just as real? Or are they only culturally real? A simulation of the weather only makes sense when you have humans around to interpret the output from displays. Inside the machine, it's just a lot of 1s and 0s. It's not even really that. It's a lot of electrons moving about. A bunch of electrons aren't a simplification of the weather. It's only because human culture has computing devices that simulations make any sort of sense. Physical systems aren't about anything, and don't represent anything on their own. It's the entire problem of intentionality.
    - unfunco 10y ago
      > It's a lot of electrons moving about The actual weather is also a lot of electrons moving about.
      - goatlover 10y ago
        Sure, in part, but we don't consider weather systems to be running simulations. Although Jaron Lanier wrote a paper on treating a meteor shower as a simulated computer running simulated minds to make a point about consciousness.
    - naasking 10y ago
      > Inside the machine, it's just a lot of 1s and 0s. And inside reality, we're just a lot of vibrating strings. I don't see any meaningful difference what the fundamental constituents of reality are. "Real" is simply a relation between perceived and perceiver. > Physical systems aren't about anything, and don't represent anything on their own. It's the entire problem of intentionality. By your own argument, 1s and 0s aren't "about anything" either, they're just as devoid of intentionality anything "truly real".
- goatlover 10y ago
  But the argument for living in a simulation is parasitic on being outside of a simulation. We say that we could be inside a simulation because we notice that the physical world seems to support the possibility of incredibly detailed simulations which could be indistinguishable from what we experience now. But if we're in a simulation, none of that reasoning applies. In that case, the argument is undermined.
  - sa_su_ke_75 10y ago
    the dream is a simulation? we create also an "avatar" of us that is completely different from us like memory and personality. But when we wakeup we understand that was a dream, and also we can wakeup inside the dream (lucid dreaming)
    - goatlover 10y ago
      But the philosophical worry that we could be in a dream our entire waking lives is based on the fact that we wake up from dreams, and can therefore distinguish being awake from being in a dream.
      - sa_su_ke_75 10y ago
        Plotino in the Enneadi say that our life is a teatral rappresentations, and we (we as "souls") are actors that interpreting a role in the show of live. And we are worry for our role more that for our soul. the role is the mask and the soul is our reality.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Not everything that you cannot disprove should be believed to be true, or even taken seriously.
empath75 10y ago
His book "Robots: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind" is really excellent, even if he takes quite a few gigantic logical leaps that aren't really justified, imo. It's just a great piece of futurology.
- joshmarlow 10y ago
  I also enjoyed the precursor, "Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence".
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Agree, one of the better books on the subject in the sense of framing a potential path towards the robotic revolution.
monadai 10y ago
My alma mater ^_^. The basic loop is : http://monad.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dev_framework.png http://monad.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dev_framework.png You can alter the environmental context easily by re-directing the wire in/out : http://monad.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dev_context.png http://monad.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dev_context.png. An individual would be none the wiser. Sure we could be in a simulation. It's interesting to ponder on it. You'll begin forming answers when you dissect the different components, relationships, interactions, and try to create your own version of it : Say AGI. ;)
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  It's amazing how many people speak about AGI as if it's even a theoretically plausible thing. It's about as plausible and well substantiated as the Christian God. Which isn't to say it's impossible, but just that it's almost entirely an article of faith. There are a few anecdotes which maybe hint at its possibility. But nothing even approaching a rational explanation of how it might be built. Also, the model of cognition you are describing (information processing or I/O) is very old, from the 1960s. It was inspired by the discovery of the computer. There are other models, like Ecological Psychology, Embodied Cognition, Distributed Cognition. It is tempting to draw a box around the brain and posit that it's the most important interface and that all of the important information passes through it. But whenever you break down so-called "cognitive" phenomena, you find that often very little information passes through that barrier. The lions share of encodings remain outside the brain, and for any given animal task, quite a lot of information processing happens outside the brain. In a weird way, the information processing model is a vestige of the notion of a soul. If you really accept "physical fundamentalism" as OP describes it, then the interface between the brain and the rest of the world is nothing at all. Just a ribbon of atoms with a name. No more interesting than the interface between your stomach lining and the bacteria inside, or between the vibrations in front of your mouth and all nearby ears. The only reason to center the brain/environment interface is to try to separate what you consider to be the essential identity of a person from their physical grounding. I.e. to maintain a model which includes a soul.
  - monadai 10y ago
sa_su_ke_75 10y ago
in the dream for oriental philosophy we create the connoisseur, the knowledge, and the known object. or in other terms the object experienced, the experimenter and the experience of the object known.
eternalban 10y ago
The elephant in the room of the assembled Gaian biomorphs is the Human capacity for discerning meaning. Meaning and consciousness are very much related. A simulation is only dealing with form.
- hackinthebochs 10y ago
  >A simulation is only dealing with form. It seems to me a sufficiently precise simulation would necessarily capture meaning. If meaning is critical to decision making and that decision making is precisely simulated, then the simulation must also capture meaning.
  - eternalban 10y ago
    > It seems to me a sufficiently precise simulation would necessarily capture meaning. That is the very bone of contention here. > If meaning is critical to decision making. I don't believe it is in the general case. Our current crop of Go winning machines seem to indicate otherwise.
    - hackinthebochs 10y ago
      Within the context of Go, what meaning does the Go playing machine lack?
      - eternalban 10y ago
        Within the context of Go, what meaning does the Go playing machine require? (Entire point here was to refute -- in the general case -- the notion that "meaning is critical to decision making".)
        hackinthebochs 10y ago
        A go playing machine certainly has to have some equivalent representation of "piece", "move", "capture", etc. These concepts have meaning within the context of Go as a set of valid board states and transitions. Understanding these fundamental features of the game is required for proper decision making within this context.
drostie 10y ago
I am very happy to see this at least bring up one of the most strange parts of Everett's many-worlds (and others' "many-minds") theories: that in them, you are immortal; for there always exists a possible world which you didn't lose consciousness in, and your final consciousness will only propagate into those worlds. Searle's objection still seems to hold some water, though. Consciousness does not seem to be a computation because whether something is a computation is observer-relative; for some observers this set of electrical flickering makes sense as a computation to produce a sunflower-like pattern of points based on emitting branches in directions of (pi * the golden ratio) radians... but for the vast majority of observers probably it doesn't seem like anything until I print out a picture of the result; and even then it might not mean anything to those observers (they might be blind, or they might not associate it with sunflowers, or they might have alien brains so differently wired from mine that they simply cannot appreciate art the way that humans can). We actually have formally defined computation to be observer-relative in precisely the way that the status of what words a book contains and what those words together mean is observer-relative (think that in some other parallel universes the English language was exactly the same but that the words for 'cat' and 'dog' were transposed, and so this same book tells a somewhat different story in those worlds). The problem is that my two bunnies seem to be quite conscious, to say nothing of myself or my girlfriend. It's not just that they're conscious-relative-to-me-but-it-depends-who's-looking... if that's true then it's a very different perspective which almost nobody takes seriously and practices. My bunnies just seem to be conscious, full stop. They appear to have both interests and the capacity to feel pain (observer-relative consciousness), but it appears to be more than just an appearance! In some sense they are objective observers who their own consciousness is relative to; therefore they are objectively conscious in a way that computations just don't seem to be objectively anything. The hope of the functionalist approach to consciousness, with its common-sensical "anything which could replace this airy-fairy consciousness stuff in all of its functional roles would be equally justified to be called conscious," is therefore that as processes with no-intrinsic-meaning become more complex and more involved, there is some way to say "no, the parts of that don't have much intrinsic meaning by themselves, but you put them together and then this thing is objectively computing X or Y, there is just no other way for an observer to view it, it has passed a complexity threshold beyond which there is only one interpretation of it." Our books, with the cat <-> dog substitution looming in our minds, clearly don't pass this threshold by-and-large, but perhaps things more complicated processes than those books' narratives can?
dschiptsov 10y ago
The evil demon which Descartes described is very real - it is one's own mind conditioned by dogmas, traditions and so called collective consciousness, and the illusions that such a mind produces are as good as real. Simulations can tell nothing new about the true nature of reality, because any simulator would reflect the current assumptions up to date and will be based on an oversimplified model. Weather simulation is not a weather. Map is not a territory.
fiatjaf 10y ago
> The prescientific suggestion that humans derive their experience of existence from spiritual mechanisms outside the physical world has had notable social consequences, but no success as a scientific hypothesis. Why?
- ci5er 10y ago
  Would you ask this question using more words, please?
- bbctol 10y ago
  Depending on your definition of "outside the physical world," it's at best untestable. You can explain consciousness by saying it comes from a massless, noninteracting, odorless, tasteless... etc. but that explanation doesn't really help. So far, lots of other things that were previously explained by non-physical whims of God have had at least partially reductive explanations in science; a lot of people hope that consciousness will yield the same. It still may be possible that consciousness is a spiritual phenomenon, but with no way to test, prove, or expand on that, scientists would rather not close the book there.
  - goatlover 10y ago
    The modern philosophical argument against a scientific explanation of consciousness is that science is an objective, third person pursuit, abstracting away from subjective, first person. If so, you can't hope to explain the subjective in terms of the objective. There is no need to invoke the spiritual or supernatural to see that consciousness is a problem for science.
    - bbctol 10y ago
      It honestly depends on who you ask. A lot of people think consciousness is inherently unsolvable by normal science (Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness"), but there are plenty (Dennett etc.) who will deny that such a hard problem exists, and make reasonable arguments that the scientific method can make headway in reductively explaining consciousness.
simonh 10y ago
My main problem with the simulated world argument is complexity. Take the Billiard Ball example[0]. This means to accurately simulate the universe you can't really get away with approximations. Under close enough scrutiny discrepancies in the simulation are discernible, and we can scrutinize it at the subatomic level. But to simulate the observable universe, how big would your computer need to be? How slowly would the simulation run relative to the simulator's real-time? It just doesn't stack up. The only way to do it would be to fake it by generating the appearance of a thorough simulation rather than the reality of one. In which case the arguments put forward for wanting to perform a real simulation - to simulate history and so forth - break down because you'd only be emulating the appearance of it not simulating it. The only way out of this I can see is if the universe containing the simulator were vastly more complex than ours, such that in comparison our universe would be trivial to simulate. But then why would they do it? Our universe would be nothing like theirs. In principle this is possible, but it massively reduces the chances that our world is a simulation because only a subset, and quite possibly a vanishingly small subset, of possible universes would be capable of hosting the simulation. Possibly fewer universes that there are universes like ours. At which point the odds of ours being a simulation collapse. [0] http://www.anecdote.com/2007/10/the-billiard-ball-example/ http://www.anecdote.com/2007/10/the-billiard-ball-example/
- XorNot 10y ago
  We already run simulators of our universe with vastly lower resolution then reality, and they do tell us useful things about it.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    Sure, but that isn't simonh's point. Those simulations aren't very good. There's nobody living in those simulations that thinks that they're alive, let alone that is capable of creating a working computer out of the material in that simulation.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
araes 10y ago
An analogous way of saying this argument is, this world is a dream. It is a reflective dream that builds content based on the observations of the observers within that content. If I look over here, it tells me about here, if I look there, info about there. As I build understanding and knowledge about the things I'm looking at, about the act of looking itself, I gain the ability to ask deeper questions against what is effectively a lookup table of information about existing truths of the dream that I have already observed. As I observe those events more closely, and build a better reference or lookup of the information related to them, they in a sense become more stable and more solid. In the current state, all of the aspects of what me might consider a standard "dream" are present, they just exist within the wrapper of technology. The standard sufficiently advanced technology is magic argument. Truly, all technology is magic, just accomplishing magical goals with a symbolic wrapper of tech. Another way to look at it, is we all live within a light hologram. All of existence is a light hologram. It is like a bright point of light that we are continually looking closer at, and as we do, we discover the complexities of color and form within what was originally just a wash of light. All/No Colors -> White/Black -> RGB, ect... Researchers have already demonstrated the capacity to create subatomic particles using nothing but the confluence of light. It isn't a huge leap to then surmise that all "matter" is actually condensed or bound light. We are effectively consciousness objects sharing the delusion that we all possess "physical" bodies and interact with a material world, but its a reflective argument, because the material objects we interact with are only material to things within the simulation of materialism. Its like we're all on the Star Trek holodeck, but the joke is that we're all actually the Doctor, and all the meat things which think they exist within the "real" world, are fundamentally just as immaterial as the Doctor - sharing only the one thing they all possess, which is consciousness, and the ability to observe, interact with, and build knowledge about their external world.
tim333 10y ago
I thought about this essay a fair bit over the years. It's one of the things that persuaded me that reality is mathematical in nature.

74 points by Artoemius 10y ago

Morpheus from The Matrix: "What is real? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." Doesn't feel like there's ultimately any way out of this line of reasoning. What would it take to prove to you that you are indeed not in a simulation of some kind? as the only methods of providing proof are also parts of the simulation.

naasking 10y ago
> Doesn't feel like there's ultimately any way out of this line of reasoning. What would it take to prove to you that you are indeed not in a simulation of some kind? as the only methods of providing proof are also parts of the simulation. Simulations are just as real. Why wouldn't they be? What makes "natural laws enforced by reality" really any more "real" than "natural laws enforced by a simulation"?
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Well, there were the glitches - the black cat that ran by twice?
- XorNot 10y ago
  We can look for if lattice QCD was used in the big bang simulation by searching for anomalies magnified during expansion into the cosmic microwave background.
- have_faith 10y ago
  It took someone from the outside to explain what the deja vu meant though, as there was no way of knowing from the inside that the glitches where a result of a broken simulation of the internal reality.
amasad 10y ago
Not only that you can't know for sure that you're not living in a simulation, you actually can't surely tell that you existed before this point in time. Imagine that you are instantiated in a simulation with pre-installed memories that give you the illusion that you existed prior to this point. This line of thought is really old and goes back to Plato (see allegory of the cave) but formalized by Descartes (see evil genius https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon)
- SubiculumCode 10y ago
  Not a creationist, but a common argument against the earth being only several thousand years old is that star light must have taken much longer to get here given c. However, the simulation of those photons could have begun in transit, as you say.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
naasking 10y ago
> Doesn't feel like there's ultimately any way out of this line of reasoning. What would it take to prove to you that you are indeed not in a simulation of some kind? as the only methods of providing proof are also parts of the simulation. Simulations are just as real. Why wouldn't they be? What makes "natural laws enforced by reality" really any more "real" than "natural laws enforced by a simulation"?
- Filligree 10y ago
  Nothing, but the possibility does increase the chance of those laws changing.
- goatlover 10y ago
  Are simulations just as real? Or are they only culturally real? A simulation of the weather only makes sense when you have humans around to interpret the output from displays. Inside the machine, it's just a lot of 1s and 0s. It's not even really that. It's a lot of electrons moving about. A bunch of electrons aren't a simplification of the weather. It's only because human culture has computing devices that simulations make any sort of sense. Physical systems aren't about anything, and don't represent anything on their own. It's the entire problem of intentionality.
  - unfunco 10y ago
    > It's a lot of electrons moving about The actual weather is also a lot of electrons moving about.
    - goatlover 10y ago
      Sure, in part, but we don't consider weather systems to be running simulations. Although Jaron Lanier wrote a paper on treating a meteor shower as a simulated computer running simulated minds to make a point about consciousness.
  - naasking 10y ago
    > Inside the machine, it's just a lot of 1s and 0s. And inside reality, we're just a lot of vibrating strings. I don't see any meaningful difference what the fundamental constituents of reality are. "Real" is simply a relation between perceived and perceiver. > Physical systems aren't about anything, and don't represent anything on their own. It's the entire problem of intentionality. By your own argument, 1s and 0s aren't "about anything" either, they're just as devoid of intentionality anything "truly real".
goatlover 10y ago
But the argument for living in a simulation is parasitic on being outside of a simulation. We say that we could be inside a simulation because we notice that the physical world seems to support the possibility of incredibly detailed simulations which could be indistinguishable from what we experience now. But if we're in a simulation, none of that reasoning applies. In that case, the argument is undermined.
- sa_su_ke_75 10y ago
  the dream is a simulation? we create also an "avatar" of us that is completely different from us like memory and personality. But when we wakeup we understand that was a dream, and also we can wakeup inside the dream (lucid dreaming)
  - goatlover 10y ago
    But the philosophical worry that we could be in a dream our entire waking lives is based on the fact that we wake up from dreams, and can therefore distinguish being awake from being in a dream.
    - sa_su_ke_75 10y ago
      Plotino in the Enneadi say that our life is a teatral rappresentations, and we (we as "souls") are actors that interpreting a role in the show of live. And we are worry for our role more that for our soul. the role is the mask and the soul is our reality.
AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Not everything that you cannot disprove should be believed to be true, or even taken seriously.

empath75 10y ago

His book "Robots: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind" is really excellent, even if he takes quite a few gigantic logical leaps that aren't really justified, imo. It's just a great piece of futurology.

joshmarlow 10y ago
I also enjoyed the precursor, "Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence".
ThomPete 10y ago
Agree, one of the better books on the subject in the sense of framing a potential path towards the robotic revolution.

monadai 10y ago

My alma mater ^_^. The basic loop is : http://monad.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dev_framework.png http://monad.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dev_framework.png You can alter the environmental context easily by re-directing the wire in/out : http://monad.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dev_context.png http://monad.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dev_context.png. An individual would be none the wiser. Sure we could be in a simulation. It's interesting to ponder on it. You'll begin forming answers when you dissect the different components, relationships, interactions, and try to create your own version of it : Say AGI. ;)

erikpukinskis 10y ago
It's amazing how many people speak about AGI as if it's even a theoretically plausible thing. It's about as plausible and well substantiated as the Christian God. Which isn't to say it's impossible, but just that it's almost entirely an article of faith. There are a few anecdotes which maybe hint at its possibility. But nothing even approaching a rational explanation of how it might be built. Also, the model of cognition you are describing (information processing or I/O) is very old, from the 1960s. It was inspired by the discovery of the computer. There are other models, like Ecological Psychology, Embodied Cognition, Distributed Cognition. It is tempting to draw a box around the brain and posit that it's the most important interface and that all of the important information passes through it. But whenever you break down so-called "cognitive" phenomena, you find that often very little information passes through that barrier. The lions share of encodings remain outside the brain, and for any given animal task, quite a lot of information processing happens outside the brain. In a weird way, the information processing model is a vestige of the notion of a soul. If you really accept "physical fundamentalism" as OP describes it, then the interface between the brain and the rest of the world is nothing at all. Just a ribbon of atoms with a name. No more interesting than the interface between your stomach lining and the bacteria inside, or between the vibrations in front of your mouth and all nearby ears. The only reason to center the brain/environment interface is to try to separate what you consider to be the essential identity of a person from their physical grounding. I.e. to maintain a model which includes a soul.
- monadai 10y ago

sa_su_ke_75 10y ago

in the dream for oriental philosophy we create the connoisseur, the knowledge, and the known object. or in other terms the object experienced, the experimenter and the experience of the object known.

eternalban 10y ago

The elephant in the room of the assembled Gaian biomorphs is the Human capacity for discerning meaning. Meaning and consciousness are very much related. A simulation is only dealing with form.

hackinthebochs 10y ago
>A simulation is only dealing with form. It seems to me a sufficiently precise simulation would necessarily capture meaning. If meaning is critical to decision making and that decision making is precisely simulated, then the simulation must also capture meaning.
- eternalban 10y ago
  > It seems to me a sufficiently precise simulation would necessarily capture meaning. That is the very bone of contention here. > If meaning is critical to decision making. I don't believe it is in the general case. Our current crop of Go winning machines seem to indicate otherwise.
  - hackinthebochs 10y ago
    Within the context of Go, what meaning does the Go playing machine lack?
    - eternalban 10y ago
      Within the context of Go, what meaning does the Go playing machine require? (Entire point here was to refute -- in the general case -- the notion that "meaning is critical to decision making".)
      - hackinthebochs 10y ago
        A go playing machine certainly has to have some equivalent representation of "piece", "move", "capture", etc. These concepts have meaning within the context of Go as a set of valid board states and transitions. Understanding these fundamental features of the game is required for proper decision making within this context.

drostie 10y ago

I am very happy to see this at least bring up one of the most strange parts of Everett's many-worlds (and others' "many-minds") theories: that in them, you are immortal; for there always exists a possible world which you didn't lose consciousness in, and your final consciousness will only propagate into those worlds. Searle's objection still seems to hold some water, though. Consciousness does not seem to be a computation because whether something is a computation is observer-relative; for some observers this set of electrical flickering makes sense as a computation to produce a sunflower-like pattern of points based on emitting branches in directions of (pi * the golden ratio) radians... but for the vast majority of observers probably it doesn't seem like anything until I print out a picture of the result; and even then it might not mean anything to those observers (they might be blind, or they might not associate it with sunflowers, or they might have alien brains so differently wired from mine that they simply cannot appreciate art the way that humans can). We actually have formally defined computation to be observer-relative in precisely the way that the status of what words a book contains and what those words together mean is observer-relative (think that in some other parallel universes the English language was exactly the same but that the words for 'cat' and 'dog' were transposed, and so this same book tells a somewhat different story in those worlds). The problem is that my two bunnies seem to be quite conscious, to say nothing of myself or my girlfriend. It's not just that they're conscious-relative-to-me-but-it-depends-who's-looking... if that's true then it's a very different perspective which almost nobody takes seriously and practices. My bunnies just seem to be conscious, full stop. They appear to have both interests and the capacity to feel pain (observer-relative consciousness), but it appears to be more than just an appearance! In some sense they are objective observers who their own consciousness is relative to; therefore they are objectively conscious in a way that computations just don't seem to be objectively anything. The hope of the functionalist approach to consciousness, with its common-sensical "anything which could replace this airy-fairy consciousness stuff in all of its functional roles would be equally justified to be called conscious," is therefore that as processes with no-intrinsic-meaning become more complex and more involved, there is some way to say "no, the parts of that don't have much intrinsic meaning by themselves, but you put them together and then this thing is objectively computing X or Y, there is just no other way for an observer to view it, it has passed a complexity threshold beyond which there is only one interpretation of it." Our books, with the cat <-> dog substitution looming in our minds, clearly don't pass this threshold by-and-large, but perhaps things more complicated processes than those books' narratives can?

dschiptsov 10y ago

The evil demon which Descartes described is very real - it is one's own mind conditioned by dogmas, traditions and so called collective consciousness, and the illusions that such a mind produces are as good as real. Simulations can tell nothing new about the true nature of reality, because any simulator would reflect the current assumptions up to date and will be based on an oversimplified model. Weather simulation is not a weather. Map is not a territory.

fiatjaf 10y ago

> The prescientific suggestion that humans derive their experience of existence from spiritual mechanisms outside the physical world has had notable social consequences, but no success as a scientific hypothesis. Why?

ci5er 10y ago
Would you ask this question using more words, please?
bbctol 10y ago
Depending on your definition of "outside the physical world," it's at best untestable. You can explain consciousness by saying it comes from a massless, noninteracting, odorless, tasteless... etc. but that explanation doesn't really help. So far, lots of other things that were previously explained by non-physical whims of God have had at least partially reductive explanations in science; a lot of people hope that consciousness will yield the same. It still may be possible that consciousness is a spiritual phenomenon, but with no way to test, prove, or expand on that, scientists would rather not close the book there.
- goatlover 10y ago
  The modern philosophical argument against a scientific explanation of consciousness is that science is an objective, third person pursuit, abstracting away from subjective, first person. If so, you can't hope to explain the subjective in terms of the objective. There is no need to invoke the spiritual or supernatural to see that consciousness is a problem for science.
  - bbctol 10y ago
    It honestly depends on who you ask. A lot of people think consciousness is inherently unsolvable by normal science (Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness"), but there are plenty (Dennett etc.) who will deny that such a hard problem exists, and make reasonable arguments that the scientific method can make headway in reductively explaining consciousness.

simonh 10y ago

My main problem with the simulated world argument is complexity. Take the Billiard Ball example[0]. This means to accurately simulate the universe you can't really get away with approximations. Under close enough scrutiny discrepancies in the simulation are discernible, and we can scrutinize it at the subatomic level. But to simulate the observable universe, how big would your computer need to be? How slowly would the simulation run relative to the simulator's real-time? It just doesn't stack up. The only way to do it would be to fake it by generating the appearance of a thorough simulation rather than the reality of one. In which case the arguments put forward for wanting to perform a real simulation - to simulate history and so forth - break down because you'd only be emulating the appearance of it not simulating it. The only way out of this I can see is if the universe containing the simulator were vastly more complex than ours, such that in comparison our universe would be trivial to simulate. But then why would they do it? Our universe would be nothing like theirs. In principle this is possible, but it massively reduces the chances that our world is a simulation because only a subset, and quite possibly a vanishingly small subset, of possible universes would be capable of hosting the simulation. Possibly fewer universes that there are universes like ours. At which point the odds of ours being a simulation collapse. [0] http://www.anecdote.com/2007/10/the-billiard-ball-example/ http://www.anecdote.com/2007/10/the-billiard-ball-example/

XorNot 10y ago
We already run simulators of our universe with vastly lower resolution then reality, and they do tell us useful things about it.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Sure, but that isn't simonh's point. Those simulations aren't very good. There's nobody living in those simulations that thinks that they're alive, let alone that is capable of creating a working computer out of the material in that simulation.
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araes 10y ago

An analogous way of saying this argument is, this world is a dream. It is a reflective dream that builds content based on the observations of the observers within that content. If I look over here, it tells me about here, if I look there, info about there. As I build understanding and knowledge about the things I'm looking at, about the act of looking itself, I gain the ability to ask deeper questions against what is effectively a lookup table of information about existing truths of the dream that I have already observed. As I observe those events more closely, and build a better reference or lookup of the information related to them, they in a sense become more stable and more solid. In the current state, all of the aspects of what me might consider a standard "dream" are present, they just exist within the wrapper of technology. The standard sufficiently advanced technology is magic argument. Truly, all technology is magic, just accomplishing magical goals with a symbolic wrapper of tech. Another way to look at it, is we all live within a light hologram. All of existence is a light hologram. It is like a bright point of light that we are continually looking closer at, and as we do, we discover the complexities of color and form within what was originally just a wash of light. All/No Colors -> White/Black -> RGB, ect... Researchers have already demonstrated the capacity to create subatomic particles using nothing but the confluence of light. It isn't a huge leap to then surmise that all "matter" is actually condensed or bound light. We are effectively consciousness objects sharing the delusion that we all possess "physical" bodies and interact with a material world, but its a reflective argument, because the material objects we interact with are only material to things within the simulation of materialism. Its like we're all on the Star Trek holodeck, but the joke is that we're all actually the Doctor, and all the meat things which think they exist within the "real" world, are fundamentally just as immaterial as the Doctor - sharing only the one thing they all possess, which is consciousness, and the ability to observe, interact with, and build knowledge about their external world.

tim333 10y ago

I thought about this essay a fair bit over the years. It's one of the things that persuaded me that reality is mathematical in nature.