Says David J. Chalmers, professor of philosophy and neural science, interviewed on the occasion of the release of another "Matrix" sequel, in "Can We Have a Meaningful Life in a Virtual World?" (NYT).
December 13, 2021
"First of all, if it’s a perfect simulation, maybe we’ll never know that’s what it is. But if we did come to discover that we’re in a simulation?"
"It depends on what kind of simulation we’re in. If we suddenly were to start communicating with our simulators, who tell us they’re only going to upload us for eternal life if we worship them in appropriate ways, then maybe our lives would be transformed in the same kind of ways as it would be transformed by discovering that there’s a God. But if we come to discover that it’s just a simulation churning away in the background then, yeah, maybe our initial reaction would be shock, and there’d be a lot of hand-wringing, but I think I’d say, 'Well, life goes on.' Some people say that if we were to discover this, it would mean that nothing is real and this is all a delusion. I want to resist that idea. I think even if we are in a simulation, we’re still living in a real world and we can still have a meaningful life."
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49 comments:
I can’t take seriously anyone who thinks the simulation is anything more than a logic game. We make sense of the world through stories and we’re newly fascinated by software, so of course some people are going to tell the story that we are just software. That’s how the human mind works.
Meanwhile, some people are desperate for a religion they don’t have to call religion (like a god? No, they would be god.), so here we are.
The only interesting thing about the simulation theory is that we worry and make dystopian movies about machines becoming self-aware and taking over. Well, if we are a simulation, that discovery is us becoming self-aware. When do we take over?
It would be cheaper to just put LSD in the water.
Creationism doesn't die all that easily, does it.
You write a program to carry on a conversation. You code it explicitly: if they now type this they I respond that; if then they respond this, I respond that. It's just conditions and print statements.
It's a huge program covering every possibility but clearly is not intelligence, because you can easily follow the program it's running and see it's blindly following instructions set for it.
All artificial intelligence is is writing that program more efficiently, but it's the same program.
No awareness arises anywhere. You can see it doesn't.
The computer won't feel it's in a simulation or in anything.
Coleridge's Biographis Literaria chapters 5-8 covers machine intelligence
Biographia Literaria
They're short chapters and the argument still works today because it's the essential one. The machines change but not the problem they have and the mistakes in thinking about it.
David J. Chalmers, someone with too much time on his hands.
It's Elephants, All the Way Down
Call it a simulation or God or reductive scientific laws...all will lead one to conclude that somehow the universe "game" came to be with no human involvement nor control over the rules. Simulation talk merely posits an intermediary ultra-powerful species or conscious figure, and it doesn't advance the core discussion of WHY the universe exists or its controlling rules.
Read Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937) for the first (and comprehensive) outline of the logical options, disguised as science fiction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker
If we were living in a simulation, we'd have better Sunday morning talkshows.
I thought The Matrix was gee wiz sci fi with a cute little hook but it had more profound influence on some. I’m surprised at how often it’s referenced. I mean The Matrix is no Monty Python and the Holy Grail…
What the heck is being simulated? We know that almost all of the world we live in is a creation of our imagination. There is no color in the material universe, no temperature, no past, no future.
This seems a lot like worrying about determinism: no matter what your philosophical position is, when you pick up the menu you still have to choose between pancakes and waffles (unless you embrace the power of “and”).
Choose the form of The Creator.
tim maguire said...
I can’t take seriously anyone who thinks the simulation is anything more than a logic game. We make sense of the world through stories and we’re newly fascinated by software, so of course some people are going to tell the story that we are just software. That’s how the human mind works.
Meanwhile, some people are desperate for a religion they don’t have to call religion (like a god? No, they would be god.), so here we are.
You need to go read this from the point of view of someone else. Actually think about what you are saying here.
There are many different ways to approach this topic.
Yours is not a good one.
I think the professor has it backwards:
"I think even if we are in a simulation, we’re still living in a real world and we can still have a meaningful life."
I think we can have a meaningful life in a natural world which wasn't designed by any intelligence. But isn't it more likely, rather than less, that we can find meaning in a world designed by an intelligence? If they built it and peopled it, it seems as if they would have a reason for doing that and possibly would design it specifically for the purpose of the inhabitants finding meaning.
rhhardin said...
All artificial intelligence is is writing that program more efficiently, but it's the same program.
How is the human brain any different?
Put in a couple random number switches for emotion and chemical reaction variability. You can still accurately predict what most people are going to say most of the time as long as you can recreate their worldview and experiences.
Our brain has a number of neurons and they form pathways to deal with repeated experiences.
My current hobby is finding out ways to retrain and improve through manipulating the Reticular Activation System and improving Muscle Motor Recruitment through repetitious activity. There are new studies out about how the brain rewires itself and how you can use different sleep patterns to accomplish this.
Been listening to Scott Adams? : )
It's an interesting idea.
When I was a kid I imagined that I was the only 'real' person in the world and everyone else was a robot/android.
Sometimes I still do...
I’m guessing everyone has noticed this : When having a conversation with someone, it’s not uncommon for either one of the participants to pause for some period of time, and then resume the discussion after a response is formulated This delay is due to the massive backlog of read and write requests overwhelming the Universal Server. It’s a fact, Jack.
tim maguire said...
The only interesting thing about the simulation theory is that we worry and make dystopian movies about machines becoming self-aware and taking over. Well, if we are a simulation, that discovery is us becoming self-aware. When do we take over?
What is the difference between the God in the Bible and a kid playing Sim World 2054? How would it seem different to us? What is a "miracle?"
When it all boils down to it the only interesting question is "Why are we here." Below that is pretty much every other intellectual pursuit.
But that is just what I think from my point of view. If you have a good enough understanding of my background and experiences you can predict what I will say fairly accurately.
The question is not interesting to you. You have formed attachments in your brain associated with emotions and experience such that your brain releases dopamine when you espouse your belief. Denouncing challenges to your belief is a programmed response. This imprecation makes you feel good.
AI doesn't know anything except that humans operate quite predictably.
rhhardin said...
Coleridge's Biographis Literaria chapters 5-8 covers machine intelligence
Biographia Literaria
They're short chapters and the argument still works today because it's the essential one. The machines change but not the problem they have and the mistakes in thinking about it.
Meh.
The machines predict our behavior based on what we do.
Humans predict our behavior based on how we perceive ourselves.
If you ask most people what they think they will do tonight they will say things like clean up the house, go to the gym, and weed the garden and get to bed on time.
The Machine is going to predict "Watch 6 episodes of Empire."
I know which one I am going to go with.
"All artificial intelligence is is writing that program more efficiently, but it's the same program."
They argue that "genetic coding" will one day produce a self aware program that has no human fingerprints on it. But I question how they plan to test trillions of cases of randomly generated code and figure out the one that is self aware. Trillions of Turing tests? Nature can do trillions and trillions of trial and error tests, we humans? Not so much.
Oh gah, Scott Adams is all about this too. What's tne upshot, that nothing matters? Nihilism? How convenient.
OT is anyone else mildly irritated by what autocorrect guesses for your text? Like "I'm" for "in"? Solipsistic much?
Should you hope it is a simulation, even if you don't believe it is? There are things worse than death.
rhhardin said...
The machines change but not the problem they have and the mistakes in thinking about it.
Philosophers wrote a bunch of words. Talked about them. Talk talk talk.
ML algorithms are used to predict and have very specific performance metrics. They are constantly being assessed against past performance.
What is credibility? Where does it come from? What are words? How do we attach meaning to them?
Of course we are in a simulation.... The Big Bang created everything and God created the Big Bang.
According to Astrophysics by measuring the speed of the galaxies and knowing the speed of light they found there is no way the the galaxies could make it that far... hence 'inflation' (no not what Biden has created now).
For the first instance of the expanding universe there was NO TIME... NO GRAVITY... no nothing. All constraints were formed later. The original substance (I guess you would say the true element) had to cool down enough to form the first combinations... and that brought about the laws of the universe. Thus the universe expanded instantaneously over billions of miles.
Then later such as quarks, leptons, neutrinos, what ever were formed (or even something more basic... which I suspect is true.) Even later electrons, protons, neutrons... then atoms... then... all as the universe cooled down.
Kind of like a computer booting up and the electrons forming to start running whatever program bootstraps the whole thing.
So yes, God's simulation.
Of course we are in a simulation.... The Big Bang created everything and God created the Big Bang.
According to Astrophysics by measuring the speed of the galaxies and knowing the speed of light they found there is no way the the galaxies could make it that far... hence 'inflation' (no not what Biden has created now).
For the first instance of the expanding universe there was NO TIME... NO GRAVITY... no nothing. All constraints were formed later. The original substance (I guess you would say the true element) had to cool down enough to form the first combinations... and that brought about the laws of the universe. Thus the universe expanded instantaneously over billions of miles.
Then later such as quarks, leptons, neutrinos, what ever were formed (or even something more basic... which I suspect is true.) Even later electrons, protons, neutrons... then atoms... then... all as the universe cooled down.
Kind of like a computer booting up and the electrons forming to start running whatever program bootstraps the whole thing.
So yes, God's simulation.
Ah, but who simulates the simulators.
Don't be so cynical, Ann. Take the blue pill and embrace the Matrix!
When I was a kid, I learned about color blindness, and I wondered if I saw the same colors as everyone else. Then a Nobel prize was given out for detailing the biochemistry of sight, and it became apparent to me that while some people could see only certain colors, most of us saw the same thing.
Then in college getting my Chem BS degree, I worked with a female grad student. She did a side project that I helped with, testing an optical scanner that compared textile dye lots for consistency. A sample set of about 100 red swatches of cloth was sent along by the company that developed the scanner. I could differentiate about 4 or 5 different colors in the pile of cloth. She could differentiate dozens, about 95% as well as the optical scanner. And from that I learned that women can differentiate colors better than men, on average, due to differences in our retinal rods & cones.
Now I've also learned that as people age and get early glaucoma, they tend to adjust the color saturation on their TV sets so that for normal eyed people, the TV can look almost cartoonish. And this is one way families can help diagnose early glaucoma for treatment.
My own eyes have gotten "weaker" over the years, and I have to use reading glasses to focus on printed text or a computer screen. My cornea won't stretch to the required focal length. So I have something in common with the Hubble, sorta kinda.
That's just human eyes, and a few personal experiences in learning about their operation and faults. Now do eyes andall the other senses, in nearly infinite detail, and add in conscious and unconscious thought, and an entire universe of sensory and intellectual activity, and explain to me how that can be accomplished without billions of years of evolution, and a real universe in which to exist.
The problem is moot if I am correct. And if not, and we're all just robots or worse, computed algorithms, I immediately am left thinking less about me and wondering more about the operators of the program and the ones who made the simulator and the universe in which it must exist.
It's not quite Scott Adams's delusion (he thinks he may be a computer) but whether we'd work out okay dealing with a computer. I don't see how reproduction would work exactly though. The kids would be computers even if you're not.
Eddington speculated that the universe was made of mind-stuff, and physics (what meters can register) can only reach a subspace of it. So you get no inconsistencies, in particular. His suggestive evidence is that certain measurements that you'd want to make perversely are denied to you (meter sticks change length etc.) by nature.
Living as we do only in the one universe, what's our standard of what a "real" universe looks like so as to detect that we are in a simulation?
One I've heard is that if energy, time, and space are in discrete chunks (quantized) that's evidence for living in a simulation since a "real" universe would be expected to be continuously variable; but there's no way we could possible have expectations about what a "real" universe should look like if ours is simulated, since we have no experience of one and anything programmed into our simulation could reflect how the "real" universe behaves.
chuck said...
Ah, but who simulates the simulators.
That is one of the issues.
But the amount of electricity limits the processes we can run so maybe the Biden Regime driving the price of energy up is just an overt command of the person playing sim world.
When people have an answer and they are able to feel certain it provides a level of comfort.
This comfort is represented by a combination of neurotransmitters released in the brain.
But things do not disturb us. It is our judgements of those things that disturb us.
When you are disturbed by something, don't blame that thing. Blame yourself.
Assuming a simulated environment with this kind of fidelity is possible, it's far, far mathematically likely that we are living in one then outside of one. That doesn't even get into the current "fine tuned" vs "multiverse" arguments in physics.
Basically, of you belong to a civilization that can build such an artificial universe, you would be capable of creating many such artificial universes. Thus, the AI sophonts would start outnumbering the corporeal very quickly after such technology was realized.
That'll really bake your noodle.
I'm not sure some people can have a meaningful life under any circumstances or set of conditions, simulated or not.
And speculating that we're really just Sims is to me a waste of time pure and simple.
A rose by any other name. Unless death is the end, there's nothing after, nothing more, then of course the world and universe we see is a simulation.
Descartes was wondering about the same things 400 years ago.
Who cares. In this life, some things are unknowable. There are known unknowables and unknown unknowables. For many people, this condition is an insatiable itch. It's an escape from the real world that distracts seculars and true believers alike.
As Pinker says, these types of beliefs are easy to have but not take seriously because they are of no consequence. Unlike the belief of how much gas is in the tank.
Also, when living in Santa Cruz for 30-years observing the Batshit lunatic crazy homeless navigate the streets, they all stop and look both ways before crossing.
Worship or demonstration? Everyone has a religion (i.e. behavioral protocol: proscriptive and prescriptive rules). There are only flavors of religion, faith (i.e. logical domain), and ideology to realize it, and the God, gods, and mortal gods and goddesses that dictate them.
Who has the first idea of what self awareness even is to put finger to keyboard to even start to write such an algorithm? To me, that is the most fascinating question. I think that a lot of people into this simulation idea are really interested in eternal life via uploading their mind to a computer, and so, like religionists everywhere, are motivated by the idea of eternal life, and this 'simulation' idea is part of the package. Like the Great Pumpkin, if the are really sincere in their beliefs, it will come and they will never die.
Human beings interpret the world as symbols and express that interpretation, in thought and words and actions, as allegory.
Jesus you would think that guy with a graduate degree in philosophy would realize that, it is the single most important part of our existence.
tim in vermont said...
Who has the first idea of what self awareness even is to put finger to keyboard to even start to write such an algorithm? To me, that is the most fascinating question. I think that a lot of people into this simulation idea are really interested in eternal life via uploading their mind to a computer, and so, like religionists everywhere, are motivated by the idea of eternal life, and this 'simulation' idea is part of the package. Like the Great Pumpkin, if the are really sincere in their beliefs, it will come and they will never die.
This is all gibberish.
If you want to have a real discussion about this actually talk to people who know what they are talking about and listen to them.
You are just making stuff up and presenting it as other people's ideas.
You did this during COVID too.
It is really lazy thinking.
rhhardin said...
It's not quite Scott Adams's delusion (he thinks he may be a computer) but whether we'd work out okay dealing with a computer. I don't see how reproduction would work exactly though. The kids would be computers even if you're not.
You sound like an Atheist describing Christians.
Reproduction would be one of the simplest functions. Randomly pick 23 out of 46 to form gamete. Run that on each parent. Form Zygote. A few helper methods here and there.
"If you want to have a real discussion about this actually talk to people who know what they are talking about."
Please name three. Thank you.
'If you want to have a real discussion about this actually talk to people who know what they are talking about and listen to them.'
Ted Williams and Walt Disney for the first two : )
If the matrix/metaverse/virtual reality were any good, it would be a place the Wacowski brothers could go to and get it all out of their systems, so that they didn't neede to become the Wachoski sisters.
BTW, the Wachowskis are Luckinbills. No, that's not anything obscene. It does make them Lucie Arnaz's husband's nephews ... er ... nieces.
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