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Something that most people never consider in these discussions: If you accept the hypothesis that mind is generated by a computation, and that this computation

• GuiA 10y ago
  Except that your mind is not an isolatable computation - it is influenced by your body, which is in turn influenced by its immediate environment, in turn influenced by the rest of the universe in an ever expanding nested fashion. So if you want to simulate yourself, you have to simulate the universe.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • Ntrails 10y ago
    > So if you want to simulate yourself, you have to simulate the universe. This doesn't gel with me. I go back to brain in a jar stuff - I'm just streaming packets of data from nerves and processing them. Whether the "body" I'm responding to is real is pretty hard to guarentee.
    • GuiA 10y ago
      There's evidence that your brain is influenced by e.g. certain chemicals in your bloodstream produced by gut bacteria. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/gut-bacteria-on-the-brain/395918/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/gut-bacte... So the brain in a jar model where the only interface with the real world is through nerves is most probably wrong; now your jar also needs a stomach with a fully developed microbial ecosystem. And that's just one recent mechanism that was investigated; there are probably many others.
      • TelmoMenezes 10y ago
        Yes, but it doesn't follow that the computation necessary to generate the mind is infinite or impossible to isolate.
      • frobozz 10y ago
        No, at most you can say it requires a way to introduce those chemicals into the bloodstream in the brain. Actually, all you need is a way to stimulate the same receptors that are stimulated by those chemicals. Just as with unit testing, you don't actually need to hook up your SUT to a real environment, you just need to hook it up to something that will exercise the same interface as a real environment.
        • Ntrails 10y ago
          Indeed. I over-simplified - but whatever the mechanism people refer to it's mockable.
      • vidarh 10y ago
        If you are a brain in a jar, then all that evidence is simulated.
      • hasenj 10y ago
        It's just another attached input device.
    • intended 10y ago
      The simple and scientific answer is that you are not a brain in a jar. Its a mind body system, as much if not more than it is just a mind + body. The you who makes decisions on a hungry stomach, is a very different person who makes decisions when satiated, and so on.
      • Ntrails 10y ago
        >The simple and scientific answer is that you are not a brain in a jar. The question is just about simulation. Brain in a jar is an arbitrary thought experiment (Kant's(?) evil genius, or indeed "The Matrix" if you prefer) about how you can be sure your environment is real. In this there's no information assumed about what is real, just that I'm a unit (brain) processing input (electrical impulses/chemicals/whatever) which are fed to me from a source (unknown). For you to say "you just aren't" and then rely on evidence from the very systems that are being described as compromised is to miss the point. Don't bring "simple and scientific" to a philosophy fight.
    • besselheim 10y ago
      But why do you consider the brain (and presumably no more or no less than the brain) to be the vessel for your self, rather than other boundaries of embodiment?
      • wongarsu 10y ago
        You can choose an arbitrarily large vessel (e.g. you can argue that you are your body + your immediate surroundings). But the brain seems to be the smallest such vessel which still leads to an indistinguishable result.
        • besselheim 10y ago
          We know from neurosurgery that some fairly large parts of the brain can be removed without apparently adversely affecting the subject's sense of self, so it seems it must be more complex than drawing a boundary around the gross anatomy of the brain.
    • goatlover 10y ago
      Assuming nerves "stream data" and neurons "process data". Also, who is the you that is doing this streaming and processing?
      • hasenj 10y ago
        "You" is not an atomic Unit. Think of it this way. When you type something to google, what is the "Google" that is answering your question? "Where" is it?
  • TelmoMenezes 10y ago
    > Except that your mind is not an isolatable computation This doesn't follow from what you write next. You are saying that the computation needed to generate a mind is very large. I agree that it might be the case, and I would say that nobody knows how large. Do you really need to simulate in minute detail what is going on in every distant galaxy? Seems doubtful, but who knows? All I'm saying is that if this computation is finite, and the universe-in-the-large-sense (entire timeline, branches if you accept the Many World Interpretation, and so on) is infinite, then infinity wins.
    • chenelson 10y ago
      So...ever look up at the night sky? Are you not looking at information, and are you certain you understand the semantic and semiotic content that is being transmitted? Just because data is not explicit as a Pepsi commercial doesn't mean, a priori, we are without affect or effect.
      • acomar 10y ago
        There are degrees of accuracy in simulation. I expect the effect of distant galaxies to be an extremely low-order impact and so I might reasonably exclude them.
        • captn3m0 10y ago
          But what if you were working on the LIGO project?
          • TelmoMenezes 10y ago
            Well, even in this case I doubt that you need to factor in the latest political scandal in the planet Zykonn-5. But even if you need to include every minute detail, it is still finite. IF the the totality of things that exist is infinite, infinity wins. Of course it is also possible that we are alone in infinity, but that seems unlikely given what we know about evolutionary processes (perhaps even impossible given infinity, I'm not sure).
  • sullyj3 10y ago
    well, the upper bound for the amount you'd have to simulate would be smaller than the universe, you'd only need to simulate a volume containing all particles that could causally affect you within the duration of the simulation, which would be limited by lightspeed. But I think, even then, you could simulate distant stuff at far lower resolution than near stuff, in a way that dropped off in expense very very quickly. You wouldn't have to fully simulate a star I was looking at for instance, in order to represent it to my eye in a way that was indistinguishable from the real thing. you just need a little twinkling thing.
    • vidarh 10y ago
      You can go further than that. Depending on your goal, you only need to simulate enough that subject being simulated can not notice the difference. Everything else can be generated on demand. E.g. consider the game Elite. It creates an - admittedly very simple - illusion of a persistent universe by using pseudo-random numbers to generate star systems. It then populates those systems with ships whenever you visit one. But those ships only "exists" when you are in the system. Leave it and they disappear. That's obviously too simple, but the point is that most of what you see you don't interact with more than superficially: For most of the ships you have no way of knowing (other than by looking at the code...) that if you turn around and fly back to the same systems, the simulations you run into are new rather than have just moved. In general, you would be able to discontinue and discard most simulated objects after varying amounts of time. E.g. you may need to be able to regenerate a beach the subject has visited so that it looks the same, but only hours afterwards you can discard the sandcastle the subject built. In fact, I'd argue that one of the problems with some open-world simulation games today is that they permanently retain state they shouldn't. E.g. if you chop down a tree in Minecraft and leave a stub, it will remain there forever. This is made worse, because the single player version and most servers will only simulate chunks where there are players - other chunks will be "in stasis", so if you quickly leave an area, states that even in-game should be brief and temporary gets frozen in time and restarted long after they should have changed if the player later comes back. A "perfect" simulation will continue simulating any area "touched" by the "players", but over time gradually erase those state changes: Stubs rot, area overgrown etc.; buildings fall apart. Over time you can let state left behind by a player converge on a generator function that lets the simulation eventually discard the state change entirely and fall back on just generating the area on demand.
  • wongarsu 10y ago
    Only if 'I' originated in a universe where this data exists. If my original me only exists in a simulation where a lot of this data is faked (distant galaxies not actually simulated in detail, but their approximate effects on us calculated with a healthy dose of randomness, quantum-level effects only calculated when actually observed at that level, etc.), then the necessary complexity of any simulation that contains me drops dramatically.
• KCFforecast 10y ago
  I think that you can have a cheap copy of yourself if you only simulate the main factors. The problem is now to know have sensible is the system to perturbations and how to control deviations. It seems that our genes and body are programmed to recover and repair, in such a way that for example all those bad mutated cells are eliminated and we survive for 80 years. Like a flame, the laws of the university generate stable system like life.
• cousin_it 10y ago
  The meaningful version of the question "am I in a simulation?" is "how likely am I to observe meddling from simulation masters, as opposed to observing business as usual according to the laws of physics?" The only reasonable answer seems to be "very unlikely, because I haven't observed such meddling before". That reasoning depends only on induction, so it works regardless of how many copies of me exist. (BTW, I'm pretty convinced that I'm a chorus of infinitely many copies, spread out through space/time/branches/simulations/etc and splitting further on every observation. That seems almost trivially true if you believe the mind is a computation and not something more mystical. The interesting questions are about the relative measure of different copies, and so far it seems like copies in outlandish situations have low measure.)
  • moron4hire 10y ago
    There is nothing to distinguish meddling from "that's just how the universe works. Time to update the Standard Model."
    • alvarosevilla95 10y ago
      I disagree. "that's just how the universe works. Time to update the Standard Model." means we learned somthing we previously didn't, and we have to update our model. On the other hand, what if acceleration caused by gravity suddenly became 5 m/s^2? this wouldn't be new information, but a fact that directly contradicts previous knowledge.
      • moron4hire 10y ago
        "Observation contradicting previous knowledge" is literally the point of experimentation. If gravity were to do such a thing, either A) it was indistinguishable from random chance and we incorporate a concept of uncertainty into our understanding of gravity (which has actually happened), or B) it'd be reproducible and we'd... update our understanding of gravity (which has also actually happened). In neither case do we receive information we can use to determine "meddling".
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• kobeya 10y ago
  That argument sidesteps the fundamental issue of whether one should be concerned with an abstract specification of a computation (a recording of the connectome of your brain, for example) or a specific instance of it (YOU, to not put too fine a point on it).
• platz 10y ago
  > If the universe is infinite in some sense, this probability converges to 1. Limits that extend to infinity don't have to converge to 1.
  • vidarh 10y ago
    His only unstated assumption to make it converge to 1 is that the odds of any given such compution being executed in any given volume of time and space must be positive. If it is, then no matter how low the probability is for any given location and time, given he postulated an infinite universe the probability will converge on 1.
• jrs235 10y ago
  >The same computation can be performed inside a simulation, inside a simulation inside a simulation and so on. So indeed, it could be turtles all the way down!
• calebm 10y ago
  Of course, there are a few assumptions that must hold true for the simulation theory to be true: (1) It must be possible to build a computer powerful enough to simulate the universe. (2) It must be possible to fully simulate a human. This assumes Free Will is a facade (determinism). Also, it's worth noting that if a computer were able to simulate a consciousness as complex as a human, we would have the ability to create the singularity. So most likely, if we are a simulation, it is being run by the singularity.
  • elaus 10y ago
    I'd say simulating a human mind or body would be about equally complicated than simulating any other object/thing with the same amount of particles?
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  • wongarsu 10y ago
    >It must be possible to build a computer powerful enough to simulate the universe. That's not a requirement. You only have to produce something that leads to the same observations as a fully computed universe. You don't need to simulate some distant galaxy until somebody looks at it. At that point you need to show it in a plausible state with a plausible history. And if your simulation runs on tweaked rules of physics that make that kind of stuff easier, nobody inside the simulation would be able to tell. This is also a valid way to explain a lot of the weirdness of quantum theory. Experiments where an observation now influences what happened in the past make perfect sense if that past was only generated once it was observed. As far as we know, the 'real' universe has none of that quantum weirdness, and somebody just introduced those rules in our simulation to reduce the resource demand of the simulation.
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• kirykl 10y ago
  Does a mind generated by finite computation violate Godel's incompleteness ?