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I've always felt there's something deeply fallacious -- or hopelessly wrapped up in human psychology -- about taking a representation of a virtual world that we

I've always felt there's something deeply fallacious -- or hopelessly wrapped up in human psychology -- about taking a representation of a virtual world that we might create and treating it as on par with the actual universe. It's almost like saying "we're probably characters in a novel," since for every universe there are many novels. Or like that old proof that God exists because he has every desirable quality, including existence -- as if a hypothetical entity could be forced into being by sheer burden of how it is described. When we talk and reason, we call something a universe to invoke all the general properties our universe has -- except existence, of course, because it would be silly if we could only talk about things that exist. Various things like books and simulations are physical representations of universes that don't exist. By virtue of our interpretation, they are universes nonetheless. When reading a book, we fill in assumptions and details from real life if the author gives us no reason to think otherwise. Tautologically, the world of the book is different from the real world in some limited and structured way, but not in any way that keeps it from being a world at all. Physics seeks to explain the world exhaustively and reductionistically in terms of mechanisms, models, and mathematics -- basically, to boil it all down to the consequences that emerge from laws and equations that we can completely conceptualize. If the universe consisted just of electromagnetism, for example, then Maxwell's equations would be a "complete" description of the universe, and any simulation of them could be considered a universe. Everything about the universe, every general description that's true of it without reference to specific places, times, and things, would be reflected in the simulated universe as well, because science allows us to subsume it all into the more fundamental description given by the equations. The problem is that a model of the universe is stil a model. Humans invented the notion that a thing and a description of a thing are equivalent.

nessus42 14y ago
If you want to convince anyone, you have to do better than just referring to your feelings. Plato felt the world of ideas was more real than the "real" world. Cosmologist Max Tegmark argues that we have no reason not to believe that the universe is anything more than pure math, and all formal systems exist in precisely the same way that our universe does. Philosopher David Lewis argues that the actual world is nothing but the possible world that we happen to be in. Representationalists believe that any simulation that duplicates the causal structure of conscious beings would have conscious beings in it. (A novel does not duplicate such a causal structure, so that's one place where your argument falls flat on its face, if indeed you were trying to make an argument.) Searle with his Chinese Box argument is not buying it. The bottom line is that we just don't know, and are unlikely ever to know, but if one wants to argue intelligently about it, there's a huge amount of philosophical literature on just this topic. On the other hand, your position would seem to deny human rights to future intelligent robots, which has serious ethical ramifications should you happen to be wrong.
Houshalter 14y ago
There is a similar argument against AI. That a computer can't "feel" or experience any of the sensations we do. If you type 'emotional_state = "happy"', does that mean your computer feels happiness? Even if you have a complex simulation of neurons, if you zoom in, all you will see is little electrons bouncing through various logic gates and ending up in some kind of pattern. But the thing is, the exact same thing is true for your brain too! If you zoom in on your brain you will find nothing more than electrical impulses and neurons that strengthen or weaken their connection to other neurons. If the neurons were suddenly replaced with little computers that performed exactly the same, you wouldn't feel any different. You would still experience emotions and feel sensations and have no idea any parts had been swapped under the hood, unless you looked. I don't know why but this idea is confusing to me. This XKCD http://xkcd.com/505/ http://xkcd.com/505/ is a good example. My consciousness could be a bunch of static rocks and a man placing new rows based on simple rules. I find this thought disturbing, but there isn't anything fundamentally different between that, a computer simulation, and a world of a bunch of atoms hitting each other, following simple physical laws. Different beings could exist in all three universes. And each would feel emotions and sensations and all that. And each would argue about how beings just like them in the other universes "don't really exist" like they do. So how is this different from a character in a novel or a variable in a computer set to "happy"? I honestly don't know. The character in a book is completely static. Whatever is written in the pages, it isn't changing, it isn't taking input and producing output. But the rows of rocks are static too after all. They don't take any input from the outside world either. They change over a dimension of space, each new row one foot to the right of the last. As do the characters in a book. Each paragraph moves the characters forward through their own dimension of time. Maybe the process that creates the rows of rocks, the man following simple rules, is what makes it conscious. But the book is created by a writer following a process too, does that make it conscious? The only thing I can think of is that the character in the book is far simpler than a human. Words that say "john is happy" is similar to setting a variable on your computer equal to "happy". Happiness in a human is far more complex, involving tons of interactions between neurons. But this answer isn't satisfactory to me. Complexity isn't what makes something intelligent or conscious after all.
- randallsquared 14y ago

nessus42 14y ago

If you want to convince anyone, you have to do better than just referring to your feelings. Plato felt the world of ideas was more real than the "real" world. Cosmologist Max Tegmark argues that we have no reason not to believe that the universe is anything more than pure math, and all formal systems exist in precisely the same way that our universe does. Philosopher David Lewis argues that the actual world is nothing but the possible world that we happen to be in. Representationalists believe that any simulation that duplicates the causal structure of conscious beings would have conscious beings in it. (A novel does not duplicate such a causal structure, so that's one place where your argument falls flat on its face, if indeed you were trying to make an argument.) Searle with his Chinese Box argument is not buying it. The bottom line is that we just don't know, and are unlikely ever to know, but if one wants to argue intelligently about it, there's a huge amount of philosophical literature on just this topic. On the other hand, your position would seem to deny human rights to future intelligent robots, which has serious ethical ramifications should you happen to be wrong.

Houshalter 14y ago

There is a similar argument against AI. That a computer can't "feel" or experience any of the sensations we do. If you type 'emotional_state = "happy"', does that mean your computer feels happiness? Even if you have a complex simulation of neurons, if you zoom in, all you will see is little electrons bouncing through various logic gates and ending up in some kind of pattern. But the thing is, the exact same thing is true for your brain too! If you zoom in on your brain you will find nothing more than electrical impulses and neurons that strengthen or weaken their connection to other neurons. If the neurons were suddenly replaced with little computers that performed exactly the same, you wouldn't feel any different. You would still experience emotions and feel sensations and have no idea any parts had been swapped under the hood, unless you looked. I don't know why but this idea is confusing to me. This XKCD http://xkcd.com/505/ http://xkcd.com/505/ is a good example. My consciousness could be a bunch of static rocks and a man placing new rows based on simple rules. I find this thought disturbing, but there isn't anything fundamentally different between that, a computer simulation, and a world of a bunch of atoms hitting each other, following simple physical laws. Different beings could exist in all three universes. And each would feel emotions and sensations and all that. And each would argue about how beings just like them in the other universes "don't really exist" like they do. So how is this different from a character in a novel or a variable in a computer set to "happy"? I honestly don't know. The character in a book is completely static. Whatever is written in the pages, it isn't changing, it isn't taking input and producing output. But the rows of rocks are static too after all. They don't take any input from the outside world either. They change over a dimension of space, each new row one foot to the right of the last. As do the characters in a book. Each paragraph moves the characters forward through their own dimension of time. Maybe the process that creates the rows of rocks, the man following simple rules, is what makes it conscious. But the book is created by a writer following a process too, does that make it conscious? The only thing I can think of is that the character in the book is far simpler than a human. Words that say "john is happy" is similar to setting a variable on your computer equal to "happy". Happiness in a human is far more complex, involving tons of interactions between neurons. But this answer isn't satisfactory to me. Complexity isn't what makes something intelligent or conscious after all.

randallsquared 14y ago