Why The Simulation Argument is Wrong
I am sure that all of you have heard it before: "We are living in a 'simulation' and such a virtual world is the same as the 'real world' in every respect, except that it is simulated and therefore 'not real.'"
I have a few arguments against this notion:
First, if the world is simulated, why don't its 'designers' simply 'pop out' at times and leave us with some trace of their existence? Guidance through such a virtual world might be helpful, and yet there is no trace of anyone 'programming' or 'guiding' us anywhere.
Similarly, why don't we sometimes notice violations of the laws of physics? If it's just a simulation, does it matter if the laws of physics are perfectly consistent? This applies to any law of this simulated world, including propositional logic. Again, if you are there, leave us with some trace of your existence through 'miracles' and other types of anomalies that our world does not seem to have. And yet there seems to be no instances of this kind.
Third: what type of computing power would be required to 'house' this virtual universe? Are we talking about computers that are bigger than the universe itself? Is this possible even in principle?
Nevertheless, I think the best answer comes from Occam's Razor: "Explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more."
In that sense, I think the notion that the universe is 'simulated' is completely superfluous and can therefore be explained away as being 'highly improbable.'
Your opinion?
I have a few arguments against this notion:
First, if the world is simulated, why don't its 'designers' simply 'pop out' at times and leave us with some trace of their existence? Guidance through such a virtual world might be helpful, and yet there is no trace of anyone 'programming' or 'guiding' us anywhere.
Similarly, why don't we sometimes notice violations of the laws of physics? If it's just a simulation, does it matter if the laws of physics are perfectly consistent? This applies to any law of this simulated world, including propositional logic. Again, if you are there, leave us with some trace of your existence through 'miracles' and other types of anomalies that our world does not seem to have. And yet there seems to be no instances of this kind.
Third: what type of computing power would be required to 'house' this virtual universe? Are we talking about computers that are bigger than the universe itself? Is this possible even in principle?
Nevertheless, I think the best answer comes from Occam's Razor: "Explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more."
In that sense, I think the notion that the universe is 'simulated' is completely superfluous and can therefore be explained away as being 'highly improbable.'
Your opinion?
Comments (220)
That's very generous.
If this world is simulated, the "real" world must be very like this one - as in the "Matrix". But then, it if the real world is very like this one, does it include all the evidence that this world is simulated. In other words, will the inhabitants of the real world believe that they are living in a simulation. So the real world is also a simulation.....
But how do we know that this world is a simulation if we have no access to the real world and cannot compare one with the other?
I cannot distinguish the idea that this world is simulated from a fantasy or, better, a nightmare.
If a simulation exists, then there must exist at least one more thing (or set of things) which is constitutive for the simulation, e.g. a brain, a computer, their materials and properties and surrounding conditions of satisfaction. Therefore, everything cannot be a simulation.
Furthermore, if the simulation (e.g an emergent property within a network of electrical circuits) is about something (e.g. our world at the level of humans and mid sized objects), then we have at least three things to consider: the simulation (emerging from electric circuits), what causes it (a brain and computers etc), and what it is about (a part of our world). So, not only is it impossible for everything to be a simulation, the simulation is just one thing among many other things in our world.
To know whether the things that we experience belong to the simulation or to the non-simulated parts of our world we can investigate what's necessary for something to be experienced as a frog, for instance.
A frog is not just a constellation of coloured shapes that hop around for no apparent reason. Simulations, pictures, or descriptions of frogs are syntactically disjoint and detachable in a way that real frogs are not. Real frogs are continuous, recalcitrant, and seamlessly connected to other creatures and environments, which in turn are connected to chemistry, physics, astrophysics, cosmology or everything. Our ability to identify frogs, as frogs, has a causal history that arguably amounts to everything, but everything cannot be a simulation.
Quoting jkop
I like that argument a lot. :smile:
Quoting jkop
"Three things" might prove to be contentious, depending on how you define "thing". But the conclusion seems to me to be sound.
Quoting jkop
You are, rightly, thinking of me as a passive spectator in the simulation. You have left out a really important point. We are embodied and active in the world. So the frog is not just a "constellation of coloured shapes" (and sounds, smells, touches and even tastes), but also something that we interact with (as the frog interacts with us). For me, it's the interaction that distinguishes the real frog from the dream. True, I can imagine an illusory frog that I don't interact with, but only because I sometimes interact with the things that I perceive.
You're right, our bodies, sense organs, and interactions with frogs amount to our ability to identify them. The causal history, however, is what makes it necessary to experience the frog as a frog and not as a hopping constellation of colored shapes.
Another argument against the simulation hypothesis might be this:
A simulation is a representation, and a representation is selective and asymmetric relative to what it is a representation of. For example, a painting of Mona Lisa represents Mona Lisa, but Mona Lisa doesn't represent the painting. It is impossible to produce a complete representation of Mona Lisa in the sense that the representation becomes equivalent to, or a duplication of the real Mona Lisa. Photo copies of the painting represent the painting and perhaps also Mona Lisa, but they are only duplications of each other, as copies, not of the original painting, nor of Mona Lisa. Although this example only considers visual features, the argument applies to any of her features, e.g. sound of her voice, scent, feel of her skin etc. Therefore, it is impossible to produce a complete representation or simulation of Mona Lisa.
Yet many people seem to believe that the whole universe, or at least our experienced part of the universe, is or could be a simulation.
I think the point goes deeper than that. We can experience a constellation of coloured shapes as a frog, but only as a picture of a frog. My past experience acting in the world no doubt contributes to that. But to seriously fool me as a real frog, it would have to respond to my attempts to catch it (by hopping out of reach). Can I be fooled into thinking I am attempting to catch it? I would have to have all the sensory inputs, including the proprioceptive inputs that tell me where my body is and what it is doing. But if that was all controlled by the simulation machinery, I would not feel that I was doing it - my "body" would not be my own. The inputs would have to respond to my outputs - the signals that would, in real life, control my body. That is, inputs from the machinery would never be enough. I would have to be in control of my "body". The machinery has to respond to me - it has to become my body.
Quoting jkop
"Universe" is a bit slippery here. If it means "everything that exists", we have to take into account that a simulation cannot be everything that exists, because it must be a simulation of something and that something must be real - an alternate reality. We are used to the idea that there can be alternate worlds in the same universe nowadays, but the idea of alternate universes presupposes that there can be no communication of any kind from one to another.
Quoting Barkon
The idea of "real" is also slippery here - or better, it's meaning is contextual. A simulation of a battle isn't a real battle, but it is a real simulation, and it is a simulation of real (or possibly real) events. I think you are proposing that a whole universe might be simulated by a process that would be controlled in order to serve some purpose. But if everything is included, not only is there no reality to be simulated, but also there is nowhere for the creators (or their hardware) to be. So I don't quite understand what you are getting at here.
Surely you can imagine why. What you have proved so far is that, if we are in a simulation run by conscious beings, those conscious beings don't think like us humans.
Quoting jasonm
If our world is a simulation, violations of the laws of physics would be bugs. But being that the simulation is a program, it should be deterministic, and therefore consistent; so within our perspective, those bugs would just be seen as features, the only ones who could possibly identify bugs are the programmers.
Quoting jasonm
Perhaps it's a game. Maybe the hints are all around us; in philosophy, perhaps in various scriptures spanning many cultures and times, Easter eggs hidden all over the 'map'. We at least know whatever type of "nature" we live in it seems to enjoy competition.
Quoting jasonm
We see inconsistencies at the frontier of science and discovery all the time. "Paradox" exists as a concept with dozens if not hundreds of examples spanning linguistics, physical principles such as time . The Hubble constant appears to be constantly contested due to vast discrepancies in several independent attempted measurements. Gravity has not been resolves with the standard model. Glitches? Perhaps?
Quoting jasonm
All that is required is to generate one's immediate surroundings. The entire universe does not have to be simulated to the same degree of resolution. Also resolution is relative, perhaps for a highly advanced super computer, what we experience requires very low CPU - a highly pixelated version of what could be generated. How would we know any better? How could we ever imagine a world woth higher definition than that humans are currently capable of perceiving.
Perhaps many players are philosophical zombies - only simulations of people. NPCs.
Maybe you Jason, are the only real players in the simulation. Then again, perhaps you are designed only to believe you are.
Fir the record I don't actually believe we live in a simulation. I just enjoy playing the devil's (simulations) advocate. It's not as easy to discredit as one might think.
Why so? Surely the programmers can create whatever physics, chemistry and phenomena they like.
Perhaps the passage of time is exclusive to this simulation and that the higher dimensional beings that created it exist at all times simultaneously.
Perhaps our simulated physics is created for the very reason that they may wish to study how a universe would unfold under different properties and circumstances to their own.
What reason would an advanced simulating civilisation have for recreating an exact carbon copy of their own universe? Very few reasons other than maybe prediction? Which is unlikely if they're already far more advanced and evolved than us.
Maybe it is to witness first hand how their own universe played out. To gain an insight into history -the programme we are running right now. Maybe AIs great great great grand reiteration wishes to witness the birth of itself.
However, given these two reasons to simulate an identical universe, there are infinitely more reasons to simulate a non identical one.
True. But 99.99999999% of things can be simulated with one singularity type entity running the show. If we take "everything" as the set for which one phenomenon is "real" (ie the simulator) then the odds are very much against most things we know being actually "real".
Perhaps there is some universally conscious god like entity and we are all merely a fever dream in its mind or "programme". There's really no way of knowing. Everything "objective", all scientific "proofs" would be merely be one minds "subjective" decisions in this case.
Finally, in an even more wild hypothesis, perhaps such a highly advanced simulator would be non local. Simulating different parts of itself from different temporospatial points. In this sense nothing is "not simulated" it would just mean the simulation is relative at any given point to some other simulating component elsewhere. Mind fuck I know.
Maybe quantum phenomena simulate us and we similarly simulate them in some strange mutually recursive iteration, and to avoid a cancellation or violating opposition of entangled simulators, when we observe quantum events they automatically collapse into a singularity thing to maintain our ability to "observe them" (simulate their existence).
Ofc I'm on some fantasy rant here. But I enjoy dabbling in wild metaphysical speculation
How does this prove we aren't a simulation though? All it asserts is that should our existence indeed be simulated, it is imperfect when compared to the "original" or "real world/source of simulation".
That doesn't prove we are not in a simulation. At most it suggests that there is a fundamental unknowability of the authentic world that we as simulations could never grasp fully.
Minds and consciousness can't come from matter, therefore simulation theory is false.
Who says? If a simulation is wholly deterministic, there is no added value to run it in the first place. For all variables throughout the simulations play are already known by the creators.
Perhaps an ultra advanced simulator can harness randomness and chaos to generate a simulation that is generated "live" in time based on randomness and subsequent unpredictable evolution.
If you think about it, not only is such a simulation far more insightful for the creators, but it requires less control and therefore less programming. All that need be made is the initial function and then the system evolves in it's own way thereafter.
Like a mandelbrot set. The initial function can continue infinitely creating various fractals whose emerging chaos and variables would be much harder to simulate entirely as one determined instantaneous entity.
How do you prove that? It seems at the very least, matter is the carrier medium of consciousness. A necessity. If not the source.
There is, because
Quoting Benj96
is wrong.
For the reason that our brains don't have the same computing power as computers, hence smart people are running simulations all the time.
He doesn't seem to know the difference between the simulation argument (Bostrom is a good example of this) and a virtual reality argument (the Matrix is the typical example). The difference is spelled out in my fairly recent topic here https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15060/what-is-simulation-hypothesis-and-how-likely-is-it
Almost all of the arguments in favor of such things posit violations of the laws of physics. The VR hypothesis does by definition. Any simulated body being controlled by a real eternal mind/person operates under different physics than bodies that are not (called NPCs by the VR community).
Bostrom similarly suggests that physical law changes depending on the simulation's determination of intent, which means that the simulation is tasked with gleaning meaningful intent out of particle motion.
Quoting Ludwig VNot true. We would have zero empirical access to the level that is running the simulation, so we can know nothing about it. It might not be a 3 dimensional space world with physics as we know it. That's kind of likely actually since our physics cannot be self-simulated. At the classical level, maybe, but not beyond that.
Quoting jkopGood argument, but nobody asserted that 'everything is a simulation'. The argument still is valid that if we're 'probably' simulated, and if the simulating world is similar to ours, then they're also 'probably simulated'. But that's a lot of 'if's.
In a VR, the frog, and even yourself is just a collection of colored shapes, as you put it. A VR is nothing but a simulated experiential feed to a real external entity (you). You would have no way of knowing if other people (or the frog) are similarly avatars under external control, or if they're just part of the simulation (an NPC).
Yes, the apparent frog would have to apparently attempt to evade capture for it to be convincing. A simulation that doesn't do that would be simulating physics contradictory to the physics being presented to us.
Quoting jkopJust FYI, there are countless ways to run simulations. Networks of electrical circuits is but one, and those might not even be a thing in the world simulating us.
There was a suggesting that it be done via domino chains falling down. That's a tough one, but I couldn't falsify the suggestion that a Turning machine can be made thus from dominos, so it apparently works. That means (presuming physicalism) consciousness can arise from falling dominos.
Quoting BarkonAgree with this, but not sure what conventional is here. Adding a more fundamental layer to the model, especially a more complicated one, just makes the problem harder, very similar to positing that God created it all. The god is harder to explain than the simpler universe.
I agree that being simulated doesn't really make anything 'fake'.
Quoting Ludwig V
Definitions vary. In this topic, it is helpful to say 'world'. We are one world, and the level simulating us is another. Maybe they're simulating a bunch of them and we are running several simulations of our own. Those are all different worlds, all part of one 'everything that exists', which is a defintion I never liked anyway.
Quoting Ludwig V
The battle is real to those in the simulation, but not real to those running the simulation.
Quoting Lionino
Apparent violations would be bugs. Actual violations are seemingly necessary, to the point where I've never seen a hypothesis that didn't suggest fully consistent phsical laws. For instance, do we simulate the quantum interactions between a pair of protons in a star in some other galaxy? Or do we just simulate an occasional photon reaching Earth?
Quoting RogueAI
So the alternative has been falsified? News to me.
Quoting Benj96
Lionino correctly points out the error here. Deterministic doesn't mean predictable. Simulations are run today precisely for the purpose of learning something unknown despite being fully determined. Car crashes are a great example of this, a far more cost effective method of testing automobile designs than crashing actual cars.
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Again, all this is covered in my other thread linked above.
I'm not sure I fully understand. Forgive me, but are these simulations not the ones where they put crash test dummies in a model of car and ram it into a brick wall? How is that not crashing actual cars?
Or do you mean studying thr aftermath of incidental crashes on the road? Not sure how often this actually happens as there would be a lot of legal red tape with ongoing investigations into real victims.
Perhaps I am wrong about determinism tho. I always figured if variables were fully predetermined then the outcome would be invariably predetermined and fully predictable.
Like 1 + 1 = 2.
I figured that nothing is fully predetermined in real life experiment because there is almost certainly extraneous variables interacting to make the outcome for example 1+1 + X variable + Y variable + Nth variable = 2?
Not quite. They can simulate them, but that just means they can create an illusion of them. They can't create them for real.
Quoting Benj96
Yes. It's a curious game. I've never understood the rules.
Quoting noAxioms
Do you mean that no-one living in our world could create a simulation of our world? !!!
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, it is. An infinite number, to be exact.
Quoting noAxioms
That's just a posh way of saying that the battle seems real to those in the simulation. Reality, by definition, is not "in" the simulation, but outside it.
But we are talking about simulations. It doesn't have to be real.
Quoting Benj96
Why is the burden of proof on me? We know mind and consciousness exist. The existence of mind-independent stuff is simply asserted. I would like to see a proof that this stuff exists. Something a little more robust than "go kick a rock".
If that were true, there would be some account by now of how mind and consciousness emerge from matter. Instead, it's the philosophers winning the bets and the scientists losing them. How long are we going to tolerate science's failure to make progress on the hard problem?
I'm not making any claim other than we know mind and consciousness exist. It's up to the people asserting mindless stuff (i.e., matter) exists and consciousness and mind emerge from it to prove it.
ETA: Regarding simulation theory, the burden of proof is definitely on those asserting mind and consciousness can emerge from electronic switches performing switching operations.
No, none of those cases are examples of simulations. Yes, they're are crashing real cars. I'm talking about a computer model of a car crashed into a virtual brick wall, another car/truck, whatever... Yes, those simulations have occupants in them. Much of the point of the simulation to to find a design that best protects those occupants. The auto industry has huge computers dedicated to doing this sort of thing continuously.
I have myself run plenty of simulations, but not being in the auto industry, most of mine didn't have living things simulated in them.
That's what determinism means, yes. I don't think 'predetermined' is a distinct concept from 'determined'.
There are valid interpretations of physics that are fully deterministic: Relativity theory, Bohmian mechanics come to mind. There are interpretations that are not deterministic, such as RQM or Copenhagen interpretations. Bottom line: jury is out on the subject.
You'd think a simulation of reality would choose to simulate one of the deterministic models, but if I was tasked with implementing one, I would choose the nondeterministic ones since it is far less work. But it means things occurring without cause, such as the decay of some unstable particle.
It is unpredictable because the initial conditions of the system fundamentally cannot be known, but given a deterministic model and perfect initial conditions, the (closed) system will do the same thing every single time.
That highlights a different issue with simulations: No system can be closed, so it is at the boundaries of the non-closed systems where one looks for the evidence of being simulated. The car crash thing is usually a closed system. There is no environment. There's the car and its target, and sufficient road to run the scenario. Nothing else.
Quoting Ludwig VOf course not. There would for one be a need for more data than there is medium on which to store it. You you need to simulate a small system, with far less effort put into simulation of the interaction of that small system with the part outside the system.
For example, imagine an atomic simulation of a cc of water just sitting there in a tube, doing that under MWI, a hard deterministic model. I don't think any technology could simulate the water at that level for even one second. So you cut corners and don't simulate at that level unless something intentionally is paying attention to that level. Any you choose something like Copenhagen which is easier to simulate.
OK, 'seems' is a better word. But to us, we typically presume reality to be whatever 'seems' real to us without explicitly defining it that way.
Heck, that's why I favor a relation interpretation, which explicitly says exactly that. X is real to Y. Being real is a relation, not a property, so by that definition, the battle IS real to those partaking in it.
By another definition (one very appropriate for this topic, yes), I agree. Reality might not be the world simulating us. We might be 27 levels down, but there's a base reality up there (as is typically presumed), and that one is 'the reality' by the definition implied by a topic like this.
So if a picture cannot become a duplication of what it depicts we have little reason to expect that an increased sophistication of the depiction (e.g. computer simulation) could change the logic (asymmetry) of their relation. Therefore we have little or no reason to believe that we are in a simulation.
A version of the argument might look like this:
Assume that simulations are not duplications.
Simulations of experiences are not duplications of experiences.
Therefore, our experiences are not simulations.
Some might want to add that our experiences are real, but the objects and states of affairs that we experience are simulations. But if we are in a simulation, then how could the word simulation refer to an actual simulation? If we are in a simulation, then the word 'simulation' doesn't refer to anything actual. Therefore, the claim we are in a simulation (i.e. an actual simulation) is false.
So there are two ways that a simulation of our world would differ from the real world - sorry, the world as we know it.
The first is that the whole of our world could not be simulated, because the hardware would have to be bigger than the whole (real) world.
The second is that exact simulation of even a small part of the real world, down to sub-atomic and near-light-speed events could not be constructed, for the same reason.
So it would not be possible to simulate the progress of research in physics over the last 100 years or so?
I think you'll have to say that the hardware of this simulation we live in must be much, much more powerful than anything we can conceive of and that QM and GR are false. No?
Quoting noAxioms
Surely, we have to presume there is a base reality, or face an infinite regress.
I agree. I understand the argument as being a version of Cartesian scepticism. The possibility that God, or an evil demon is feeding us false information is also a fanciful scenario. The paradox of the situation is that believers in it have to put more faith in their fancies than in their experience.
Descartes did at least try to insulate his reflections from being mistaken for real, by proposing them as a thought experiment for academic purposes. I say "try" because so many people have treated his conclusions as objectively true and struggled to escape from the conclusion, when, on Descartes' own presentation, all they have to do is get up from their warm oven and go for a brisk walk in the fresh air.
Quoting jasonm
Why would or should they?
Quoting jasonm
Why should we? The model may be perfectly coherent.
Quoting jasonm
If we are a simulation and there is a world outside ours, how would we know what is possible? Since we know nothing of the world outside the simulation, we don't even know if it is done via computers. Would it not be a mistake to assume that what applies in our world applies outside it? This seems an odd position to take.
I'm unsure this is an argument. It may also be empirically wrong, and we misdescribe, or mislabel the evidence of such.
Quoting jasonm
A huge number of people claim this is so. I can't possibly vet every claim. So, it's an open question.
Quoting jasonm
I'm not sure where the intimation comes from. In principle, there is no reason why we couldn't produce simulations either larger, or more complex than our own. Seems implausible, though.
Quoting jasonm
I am not entirely convinced this is the best Razor to use when it comes to speculative cosmologies. It seems fairly clear that if anything other than materialism via random distribution at the big bang is true, it must necessarily be a theory which Occam would reject, prima facie.
Good point.
Come to think of it, the argument could be seen as a version of Berkeley's "proof" of God.
Quoting Tom Storm
It rather depends on what your project is. If the project is to make a space for fantasies, then the fact that we don't know is an opportunity, not a problem. The point where knowledge runs out is always an opportunity for myth to fill the gap. This is a myth.
From the viewpoint of fish in an aquarium, is their existence a simulated life, in that the aquarium simulates the ocean, or is it a real life, in that their environment is all they know. As with every life-form, their lives are both simulations and real. Takeaway pizzas simulate real food, social media simulates real life, sports events simulate medieval battles, surveillance cameras simulate the nosy neighbour in a small village, modern government tries to simulate the parents in a traditional family (whether father of the nation or mamala to the people) and corporate employers simulate the process of having to work for essential food and shelter.
As regards argument 1), the designers do pop out at times, but the life-form is not aware because of their necessarily limited intelligence.
As regards 2), similarly, the life-form doesn't notice violations in the laws of physics also because of their necessarily limited intelligence
As regards 3), the same amount of computing power would be required to house a "simulated" world as a "real" world.
As regards 4), the simplest explanation for fish in an aquarium is that they exist in a simulated world
You may respond that humans are the supreme intelligence in the universe and are all knowing, yet humans have only been around for 2.8 million years whilst fish have managed to successfully survive in a hostile world for more than 500 million years, regardless of whether this world happens to be "simulated" or "real".
It rather depends on what your project is. If the project is to make a space for fantasies, then the fact that we don't know is an opportunity, not a problem. Myths have always been stories told where knowledge was not possible. This is a myth.
Both make some sort of sense. It would also be possible to say that the aquarium is a little bit of the ocean. It would also be possible to say that, since the water they swim in and the food they eat are both real that their world, though small, is not simulated.
Quoting RussellA
You are confusing "simulate" with "is like".
Quoting RussellA
1) Do you have any evidence for that?
2) Do you have any evidence for that?
3) The real world does not need to be housed and therefore does not require any computing power.
4) What is the question the fish are asking? If there's no question, there's no need for an explanation.
Quoting RussellA
What does that have to do with anything?
1. The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero, or
2. The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero, or
3. The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.
He then argues that if (3) is true then we are almost certainly living in a simulation.
You know, map vs replicated territory.
This
Quoting Michael
being a good example. Amazingly detailed descriptions/theoretical models of ancestors; or physical replicas/approximations of them?
Or something else?
Yes, the world would have to be bounded, probably more than once. Bostrom for instance suggests the detailed simulation be bounded at human brains (all of them). A less detailed simulation of bodies, animals (all animals will apparently be NPCs), purposeful devices and such. Probably at least 5 levels of this, ending with 'everything else' which simulates the stars in the sky and such, more in detail only when purposefully being paid attention to.
This makes it hard to see physics be different here from there since the physics of a thing changes whenever you try to investigate it.
It has to be done at that level if someone is paying attention to it. But you choose an easy interpretation like Copenhagen, and it's usually only one particle (like the electron being sent through the double slits) that has to be simulated.
Consider smoke detectors, which very much depend on quantum indeterminism to work. Those I suppose can be classically simulated when nobody is observing them closely.
That isn't an isulated system. One could put together an approximation of the state of Earth in 1924 and simulate it from there. That (the setting up of a plausible world) would require for instance a full understanding of physical consciousness and how memories work so that each person is created will a full memory of his past and has no idea that he just came into existence. The people there pushing the view of 'Last Tuesdayism' would be correct without knowing it.
Then you run the simulation for a simulated century and you get some world that differs completely from ours, but if they haven't killed themselves, the physics would likely have developed more or less at pace with our own history. All the names of the main contributors that hadn't been born by 1925 would be different, and the contributions of those that did exist would change.
Bostrom makes some outlandish suggestions that say otherwise, like for instance that Moore's law will continue indefinitely.
Don't know what you mean by QM and GR being wrong. They're not, but they're not necessarily the physics of whatever is simulating us.
Quoting Ludwig V
You got it. I also see no motivation for our simulators to run this simulation. Bostrom suggests the 'ancestor history' thing, but it wouldn't be our history being simulated, just 'a' history, and a very different one. The only purpose of that might be to see how things might otherwise have turned out. How lucky are we to have survived to the point of being able to put together these simulations?
So I agree: the far simpler model is to presume our experiences are valid evidence of how things are, since the alternative is making up conclusions from zero evidence.
Quoting Tom Storm
As I've pointed out already, you're speaking to air. jasonm doesn't contribute to his own topics.
Quoting Tom Storm
Exactly. Everybody online that pushes something like this presumes unreasonably that the world simulating us has similar physics.
Quoting Michael
I find both these to be highly unlikely, for the reason stated in this topic and mine. Bostrom of course has motivation to rationalize a higher probability for both of these, but rationalizing is not being rational.
I'm confused by what you're saying.
Bostrom is saying that one of these is almost certainly true:
1. Almost every intelligent civilisation is incapable of creating simulations
2. Almost every intelligent civilisation doesn't want to create simulations
3. Almost every conscious person is living in a simulation
Because if lots of civilisations are capable of and willing to make simulations then they will, and so simulated persons will greatly outnumber non-simulated persons.
Therefore, if simulated persons do not greatly outnumber non-simulated persons then most civilisations are either incapable of or unwilling to make simulations.
He doesn't say which of the three is most likely to be true.
I don't see why you say that. I think you are assuming at least a soft determinism? But given that the starting-point of the history in the simulation is not more than roughly the same, I don't think you have any real basis for that assumption. I grow even more sceptical when I remember the argument that small differences, over time, can result in big differences. Remember, there were times during the Cold War when nuclear holocaust hung by a thread.
You say that you wouldn't necessarily run detailed simulations of everything at the same time, but switch to closer simulations when necessary to maintain the illusion. That's all very well, though it imposes an extra burden on the machinery because it will have to be aware of what people are attending to at all times.
But what I'm thinking about is what would happen if the people inside the simulation decided to do some physics, including, of course, experiments. That would require interaction between the person and the machinery even when they are carrying out experiments designed to reveal the physics at work. If the progress of science is anything to go by, it wouldn't be easy to fool them all the time.
Quoting noAxioms
Didn't you say something to the effect that quantum mechanics and general relativity couldn't be simulated? Perhaps I misunderstood.
There are two physics involved. One is the physics of the simulated world, which would need to be quite like ours. The other is the physics of the world in which the simulators exist.
Quoting noAxioms
Even luckier to have the resources to waste on such a project.
Yes he does, and, as you say, he doesn't say which of them he thinks most likely - though many people seem to have decided that 3) is the best bet. I've no idea why.
But I couldn't see why Bostrom thought that one of those three must be true.
If lots of civilisations are capable of and willing to make simulations then they will, and so simulated persons will greatly outnumber non-simulated persons.
Therefore, if simulated persons do not greatly outnumber non-simulated persons then most civilisations are either incapable of or unwilling to make simulations.
I see.
According to Merriam Webster, "like" means the same or nearly the same, whilst "simulate" means to give the same or nearly the same appearance often with the intent to deceive. Therefore, simulation involves some form of deception.
The world as experienced by the human mind can only ever be a pale representation of any real world that may or may not exist outside the mind, yet we deceive ourselves that we can directly know such a world. It is inevitable that any world in our mind can only ever be a simulation of any world that may or may not exist outside our minds.
Bostrom does not say this. We create simulations today. He calls the state 'posthuman', and it apparently means a device capable of simulating all of human civilization to a level sufficient for the full consciousness of the humans, and also a full simulation of more complex things like the simulation hardware itself.
He doesn't say that either. He says that nobody will run 'ancestor simulations', which is defined as simulations (however long or brief) of our own evolutionary history. But such a simulation is impossible since no intiial state they give it would evolve anything like our actual history. They can run a sim of an arbitrary alternate outcome from the initial state, but that won't be our ancestry history, it will just be a simulation of fiction. Depending on where they put the initial state, there might not ever be humans at all.
So two premises, each of which has odds of being almost exactly 1.
That is a valid suggestion if the odds of the above two are small.
Point is, you are misstating Bostrom's premises. Item 3 doesn't follow from the premises as you word them.
He does. Most of the paper focuses on rationalizing low probabilities for the first two premises to the point of 3 being likely.
Quoting Michael
Incapable or unwilling to simulate a lot of them. I see purpose in simulating one person, or a very small group in a closed environment. There's value to that. But not to simulating that group that has decided to have its own simulating machine and running the same simulation.
Quoting Ludwig VScientific discover is sort of inevitable. Einstein stated somewhere that relativity theory was totally ripe after M&M experiment showed the apparent frame invariance of light speed. Minkowski would have come up with SR, but not GR. Others would have had to finish it.
The progress of physics is yes, a sort of fatalistic thing, much like Asimov's foundation series: It will happen inevitably, presuming there is the means to make progress. Much of progress hinges on the political state of things, which cannot be fully predicted.
Oh yes. That's what I mean above by 'presuming there is the means to make progress'. Plenty of viable outcomes have us all nuked away, or a pandemic or something. Asteroid is not likely since that isn't a chaotic function over times as short as centuries.
Bostrom suggests that, yes. It's a necessary thing for an open system. Most simulations we run today are not open. Not always the case. I used to run computer chip simulations which has to be an open system since (most) chips need external input to drive them. We needed to see how the chip would function before going to the great expense of actually manufacturing a batch.
You got it. Also what their devices are attending to, even when the people are not around.
What if the human decides to dig at location X? That location was trivially simulated up until now, but suddenly the machine has to decide if there should be a dinosaur there or something, even when the digging is not being done for purposes of looking for them.
Nope. It would be dang difficult, which is a decent reason why nobody would attempt such simulations, simulations good enough to fool its occupants, even the very smart but skeptical ones.
QM can't easily be simulated, but it can be done. My example of the cc of water was an example beyond some limits, but it depends on the interpretation being simulated.
I don't see much difficulty with relativity theory being simulated. They do that all the time in astronomical simulations like what it looks like to fall into a black hole, or a sim of our collision with Andromeda.
The difficultly in simulating QM is not in any way evidence that it is wrong. It's just evidence that it isn't classical, and most simulations as we know them are classical simulations.
If we are simulated, then the physics of the simulated word IS our physics, by definition. They can't be wrong. They might be only an approximation of what the runners of the simulation actually wanted.
For instance, any simulation run by us is discreet. Humans and machines only have access to a countable set of numbers, leaving most of the real numbers inaccessible. For instance, a typical floating point number is but 64 bits in a computer, more if you want more precision. There are only so many values that a finite number of bits can represent. The rest are off limits.
Real physics seems to work with real numbers, not these discreet numbers. But we can't prove that.
They are not premises. (3) isn't intended to follow from (1) and (2).
What paper are you reading? From the conclusion to Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?:
Right you are.
They are three options, and the premise (the one and only and false one) is that one of the three options is very likely to be true. In fact, all three as you stated them are unlikely and a 4th option is the true one: There is neither capability nor desire to run sims of more conscious humans than there are real humans.
As for 1, his assignment of low probabiltiy to that is due to becoming extinct before it happens, not to it not being plausibly possible. Discussion of item 2 seems to suggest that it is for some reason, something that a wealthy person would want to do. I have no idea why. I guess it implies that despite this arbitrarily advanced technology, it's still costly to use it.
Yes, I agree that nowhere in the paper (except an impication in the title) does he conclude that the third option is the most likely. He's done talk shows and such, and there's very much an argument for its likelihood, but maybe such assertions are necessary to get him on the paying talk show.
That its just reheated Descartes and silly.
Otherwise I invite you to reference Descartes' writings.
That this reality may be a simulation and in every way the same as the real world is simply the deus deceptor. Which is all the Matrix was; which is all simulation hypothesis nonsense is: reheated, reworked Descartes.
I know says its from a computer. The same basic concept. Replace the computer with a dream of a malicious demon, and its basically the same thing.
All of it is cooked up by the human mind, including the meaning of reality, simulation, computer, etc. Just a silly waste of time.
Of course, and too often. And it always raises this very logical question in my mind: "If we are, how would we know it?"
Likewise regarding parallel universes, etc.
For me, really wondering about such things and taking them seriously, even as hypotheses, is wasting "gray matter" and time. Such things are good only for having fun and creating sci-fi stories.
Quoting jasonm
How do you know if they do? And if you have such an experience, how would you distinguish it from illusion, delusion or hallucination?
Quoting jasonm
You couldn't know what laws of physics would apply to other universes ...
All these questions have the same basic answer: "How would you know"?
(At least, your position/conclusion on the subject is correct. Well, for me at least. :smile:)
The simulation assumes a "physical" world, the evil genius hypothesis doubts the physical. The virtual reality hypothesis (called simulation here) is pretty much the same to the brain-in-a-vat argument, which finds its closest parallel in Descartes in the always-dreaming hypothesis which are still different, as in BIAV the sensations are caused strictly by an outside mechanism (machine) while in the AD the sensations are caused by one's own mind and more extensively not caused by a real world (denial of extended AD implies denial of BIAV but not conversely, strict AD and BIAV are independent claims).
It reminds of Descartes, but it is not strictly the same.
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Light reflecting off of objects and producing color and form in mind is a kind of simulation. My idea about the sun being a frame that literally frames space and locks those in its locale into a physical reality, whilst other stars, who's gravitational influence we are not part of, have no physical reality to us, is another example of a possible simulation(but it's just a random theory I had).
Why is the original post an argument against a more normalized use of the term simulation? Why can't the universe work reversed from a off-center of the final product? Why must the big bang had to of happened rather than it's just the anti-thesis to what was actually produced by something more miniscule?
I suppose it is not unreasonable to apply a judicious, but not radical, scepticism to this argument or at least some of it. Long posts risk not being read, so I shall focus:-
I charitably assume that "all people" means all people past, present and future, including artificial people developed as part of a holistic simulation - if there be any such. What is the evidence that there are any people with our kind of experiences living in a simulation - apart from NASA experiments, archaeological research and trials for deep-sea mining? None that I know of.
But the Doomsday Clock is at 90 seconds. Extinction without any evolutionary descendants is a real possibility and should have been included as a fourth possibility - amongst many others.
That seems to follow. However, let us note that "we almost certainly live in a simulation" assigns a probability of, say, 0.99 to "we live in a simulation".
In probability theory, it is indeed regarded as sensible to do that if we have listed all the possibilities. But the rule only really applies in mathematical probability, which this exercise is certainly not. The Bayesian notion of credence is based on an admittedly subjective evaluation of the evidence for each outcome. But there is no real evidence for anything here, so the assignment is arbitrary, rather than sensible.
In any case, what we actually have is a probability of 0.33 that the probability we are living in a simulation is 0.99. That seems a good deal less than almost certain and almost certainly less that 0.5.
Yes. But some people have peculiar ideas of fun. Other people get annoyed and engage in the forlorn hope of persuading them to stop being so silly.
Quoting Lionino
True. The point of the comparison is to introduce some perspective and suggest that these thought-experiments are subject to similar criticisms.
Quoting Barkon
Really? What is it a simulation of?
Have you ever imagined that what you say is not actual understanding of something but word-salad that comes from cloudy thoughts?
This is nonsensical gibberish and you have no clue what you are talking about. I challenge you to reference one single scientist or philosopher that says anything like that concerning 4D space.
In no way because that makes zero sense. Zoom refers to scaling an image using lenses, not to whatever you are trying to say. And you were talking about 4D, not as time as an extra dimension to the 3 spatial ones.
Quoting Barkon
No, and you had no case, just gibberish.
I didnt say it was the same it has unique features. But in line with the tradition, in my view, of being an utter waste of time.
That's not what the quotation says - unless you take "not involving practical action" to mean "waste of time".
Quoting jasonm
Well, perhaps we do. But when we do, we don't immediately assume that they are violations of anything. The most reasonable assumption is that we don't understand what is going on. Sometimes, it turns out that what we've noticed doesn't violate our laws of physics. Somtimes we decide that our laws need to be revised. It would take an awful lot to conclude that the phenomena betray the hidden machinery of a simulation. To conclude that would be no more reasonable than concluding that God had performed a miracle.
That is exactly what I am taking it to be, as that is what I think Mikie means by waste of time no way to be sure however.
Well, there are different ideas of what constitutes a waste of time.
I do think that Descartes' exercise is a waste of time. It's just that I don't equate all theoretical work with wasting time.
Mind you, the second phase of Descartes' project is to find one's way out of the scepticism of the first phase, so perhaps the waste of time is allowing oneself to become stuck in the first phase of it.
Quoting Ludwig V
:smile:
Quoting Scarecow
Interesting.
A cosmic brain would be at least very like a god and there are plenty of ideas along those lines - and plenty of people believe them.
So the simulation hypothesis could be seen as a new version of an old idea, perhaps more suitable for our materialistic culture.
The question then arises why people actually believe them?
Interesting, your discussion of "representation." I do not believe the universe is a simulation.
And I don't believe our experiences are or are a part of a simulation.
But I am entertaining the thought that our experiences are representations (or at least structured thereby/processed thereby). No need to elaborate now. But does your adamant position regarding simulation preclude that?
Could it be, Nature is not a simulation. We are not in a simulation. But--to be very brief and simplistic--because all of our knowledge is "delivered/processed/constructed" by representation (of the presumably real thing--like your Mona Lisa), we are necessarily "closed off/boxed off/inaccessible to" the real "thing;" causing this (problematic) intuition that our experiences are "appearances/projections/illusions"? Hence, the idea in popular culture of the Simulation.
And though I am far from understanding the physics..., maybe even the scientist/mathematicians who so theorize (about a simulation), do so because they are inevitably using our representation based experiences to uncover reality, I.e , to uncover always "the Real thing" of things. And yet, those representations necessarily box us off from that real thing (just as the painting necessarily boxes us off from the real Mona). This inevitably causes them to arrive at calculations and conclusions suggesting we must be in a simulation. While, really, it is because they are only examining representation, and they are only using tools of representation.
I think this topic betrays the underlying current of art which--like it or not--drives all philosophy.
Also, ultimately, if it were a Simulation (which I have no reason to believe) then our efforts to prove or disprove are absurd give the "Simulator" would likely be utterly other than us and our comprehension. And yet we toil.
Which I guess brings us back to art.
:down:
It is impolite to ask for an opinion, receive one and not replying.
It's never been clear to me whether Bostrom himself makes this distinction.
If the point is merely that we're being fooled by the simulator, this is just Descartes's clever Deceiver. Since my consciousness is outside the the simulation (or as Descartes puts it, even if I'm deceived, there's still an I that's being deceived) the simulation argument explains nothing. The mystery of consciousness remains.
But if my consciousness itself is simulated, then the simulation argument requires that consciousness is computational, a point I strenuously disagree with, with Penrose and Searle on my side.
Does Bostrom actually address this distinction?
Bostrom seems to presume that consciousness is computational, and leaves it undefended.
In such a simulation, nobody is being fooled.
In a VR, is it a lie to have the subject experience a world that is not the same world as the reality in which the mind exists? If so, most forms of dualism are arguably deceptions.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
You're not the first in this thread to express disapproval of this practice. I noted it before I posted my first reply and didn't bother to address any of his post directly, knowing that he seems not to even read any of the replies to most of his topics.
I've seen the argument -- perhaps this wasn't in the original Bostrom paper, I don't recall -- that we should consider Pong, the original video game. versus the amazingly realistic video games of today. The argument is that in the far future, our video game technology will be indistinguishable from reality.
That might be true.
But if the Great Simulator in the Sky (and exactly how is that any different than God?) is implementing my consciousness as well as my perceptions, then we have made NO progress since the days of Pong, since we have no idea how to implement or simulate consciousness. So that argument fails. That's one of my objections to simulation theory. The "progress in video games" argument" fails. We've made no progress in simulating consciousness.
Quoting noAxioms
But it's a commonplace fact that we don't experience reality as it is. There are sounds out there that bats hear and we don't. Flies have those crazy compound eyes. We're back to Plato's cave and Kant's nuomena. There's a reality "out there" and we only experience its shadow, or representations of it mediated, filtered, and distorted by our senses. Huxley's doors of perception. The idea is clearly true. Our vision is terrible. If we had better resolution we could see molecules.
Berkeley had the most parsimonious version of this idea. Since we experience everything through our senses, there's no need for an outside world at all.
I would put things differently. We have clearly made tremendous progress in simulating all manner of physical processes, including those happening inside brains. Where we have made no progress is in developing a conceptual framework for connecting such physical processes with the subjective experience of consciousness.
We are already able to create systems that appear like a conscious subject on a passing glance (though humans also occasionally ascribe consciousness to anything from cats to rocks, so perhaps that's not surprising). It seems likely that we'll be able to create artificial systems which are indistinguishable from conscious subjects in a number of circumstances in the near future.
Perhaps this will bring us closer to understanding our own consciousness, but perhaps not.
It might be possible that some people actually are in the simulation, but if that is the case they should be aware of it, as they would have a marker.
What it shows is that being a person is not simply a matter of fact, like weighing 15 stone or being 6 ft tall. It is a whole network of concepts (language game) which define, not only the properties a person has but their abilities and responses and, most important, the relationships we can have with them. So we can decide to treat as persons things that we know aren't "really" persons. Wasn't there a film in which someone fell in love with one of the voices that they give to machines these days?
It is also possible to treat cats (and people) as physical objects. Sometimes this is "dehumanizing" and morally objectionable. But analysing people as machines has also been incredibly productive. So it's not simply false (or true).
Quoting Echarmion
There is a story that Hitler was able to throw a tantrum whenever it suited him. He may have been faking it at the beginning, but people around him had to treat it as genuine. They ended up not being able to tell the difference, but then having to respond on the basis it was genuine. The question whether it was genuine or merely indistinguishable was impossible to answer. But it wasn't just about some fact about Hitler; it was also about their decision how to respond.
I start with a few.
1) It's not all a lie. I mean, I can't know that, but if it's all crap, then I can know nothing regardless of how I interpret the lies, so I have no choice but to give weight to the empirical.
2) It's not about me. If I am the center of the universe, the rest is probably a lie. So I pretty much find that any view that puts me, humanity, Earth, the universe itself, as the center of something larger, to be unproductive.
Descartes apparently worried about it all being a lie. I reject that road only because it is untravelable, not because it is wrong. But it seems that modern science has thrown a cold paid of doubt on the validity of "I think therefore I am".
Quoting fishfry
As I said, one can empirically examine the causal chain that makes the body walk for instance. In a VR, it does not originate in the brain of the avatar, but external, from the mind controlling the body. Say you're playing tomb raider. Open up Lara Croft's head. No brain in there, or if there is, it's just a prop. None of the stuff she does has its cause originating from there.
Why does nobody pursue such investigations? Is technogoly still so backwards that it can't be done? They already have machines that can detect a decision having been made before you are aware of having done so yourself.
Trendy, yes. Kind of dumbs down the validity of any scientific discovery. Why would a simulation choose to display CMB anisotropy if that isn't what a real universe would look like?
Quoting fishfry
I think that example was being used as an illustration of Moore's law, and not as support for a VR hypothesis.
:up:
Why do you think it's not computational?
But you are agreeing with me. We have made zero progress in simulating or implementing consciousness.
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, the humans are the weak point in the Turing test. And LLMs are not conscious or intelligent, they're just "stochastic parrots."
Quoting Echarmion
I'll take the other side of that bet, having observed the AI hype cycle since the 1970s. And even if I'm wrong about that, we still haven't implemented consciousness. And you agree with me.
Quoting Echarmion
Most likely not. The current mania for LLMs is literally silly. Their utility is already fading as we've run out of training data, and they're starting to feed on their own online output.
So you DO have axioms :-)
Quoting noAxioms
It works for me, as an objection to the VR aspect of the simulation argument. Even if I'm living in a realistic VR, that doesn't explain the "I" that's being deceived.
Quoting noAxioms
I think Bostrom is trolling us and can't believe so many otherwise smart people take him seriously. Likewise Tegmark's mathematical universe. An even more obvious troll.
Quoting noAxioms
Why does Ms. Pacman have to eat those silly pellets if we, the simulators, have a much wider variety of nutritious and tasty food? In fact video games are the counterexample to the claim that our simulators' world must be similar to our own.
Quoting noAxioms
Hmmm. Moore's law is just a heuristic, and is already failing. It's not a law of nature. You could be right, perhaps I'm misremembering where I saw the argument [that video games have advanced greatly therefore simulations will eventually be indistinguishable from reality].
In any event, if you regard our media environment as a simulation, it's already taken for reality by billions of us. You know the meme going around. The Amish didn't contract covid, because they don't watch tv.
Searle. Bit flipping lacks intentionality.
Is your web browser passing judgment on the opinions you post to this site? Does Ms. Pac-Man experience pleasure eating white dots, and terror being gobbled by monsters? The ideas are ridiculous on their face. The onus is on those who claim that a digital circuit could be self-aware. And to anticipate a common objection, the brain does not operate by the same principles as a Turing machine.
With the Penrose & Searle reference right there? The answer is obvious. Bostrom obviously doesn't hold this view.
Quoting fishfry
I hold them to be true out of necessity, not because they necessarily are. Another one then I forgot to list: No magic. "I don't know, needs more investigation" is a far better answer than the god of the gaps explanation. Every time one of those open questions finally gets answered, it's never magic. The magic explanation is thus far on the wrong end of a shutout.
Why does the sun cross the sky each day? God carries it thus. What's have we learned since? Clue: It isn't that Earth goes around the sun, since it doesn't do that each day, yet that's the rebuttal typically given.
Quoting fishfry
You may not buy into Tegmark's suggestions, but that doesn't make him a troll. I don't agree with him either, but I still read the book and find it revolutionary. His attempts at empirical evidence are completely faulty, but one is expected to pony up evidence to bump the idea from interpretation to actual 'theory'. He doesn't call it that, only calling it 'hypothesis', but even that word implies falsifiability.
Quoting fishfryMatter of time. Right now it only passes judgment on my choice of sites on which I choose to post my opinions.
Obviously yes. As a Searle fan, you should know this. The question is does Blinky experience pleasure eating Ms Pacman? Blinky is an NPC. Ms Pacman is not. The answer there is no only because such experience would provide no benefit to Blinky, so there's no reason for it to be there. This would not be the case in Bostrom's sim, were it possible.
Agree, but a physicalist would say that the brain could be implemented by a Turing machine, just as it could be pencil and paper. Arguably, the latter might actually be more efficient. Turing machines are not designed for practicality. They're a model of computability.
Why do people who reject God accept the Great Simulator? The GS is just God constrained to computability.
Quoting noAxioms
One could write out the equations for a geocentric solar system -- hmm, I mean Earth system! -- and get the exact same predictions. It's just a matter of perspective and utility. A frame of reference problem.
So: "God does it -- harumphh, you ignorant peasant!" but "Oh the Great Simulator does it, you're a wise TED talker." That's the logic I disagree with. Simulation theory is just theology in a black turtleneck and jeans.
Quoting noAxioms
I laid out my case that Tegmark is a troll here ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/904316
Saying that the world "is" math rather than is described or approximated by math is such a massive category error that there is no possibility that Tegmark isn't trolling us.
Quoting noAxioms
How does he get around the category error problem, confusing the map with the territory, or the program with its execution? My hat is off to you for having read the source material.
Quoting noAxioms
You give your browser far too much credit. It passes no judgment on anything. You are the one who has judgment. The browser just flips bits on your computer to implement certain communication protocols that it uses to exchange data with a web server. And the data has no meaning, it's just a long string of bits. Humans give it interpretation and meaning.
Quoting noAxioms
You can't believe that. Are you joking with me or making some kind of point I'm not understanding? It's not possible that you believe that literally.
Quoting noAxioms
Searle's rolling in his grave and he's not even dead. That's not true. Searle denies that bit-flipping instantiates intentionality or feelings like pleasure.
Quoting noAxioms
You are totally trolling me. I am really puzzled by this. You can't mean what you are writing.
Quoting noAxioms
No. A computationalist would say that. A physicalist, which Searle is, would say that something unique to life implements consciousness, but whatever it is, it's not computational. Or maybe he didn't say that, but I did. That's what I tend to believe. Physicalism but not computationalism.
I'm still disturbed by the things you claim to believe.
Ms. Pac-Man experiences pleasure? What on earth can you mean?
Anyway if simulation theory is true, we're all characters in a video game in an alien bar, and they're about to run out of quarters.
Or is there another explanation for our agreement on so much of what's mind-independent?
Perhaps only my mind exists, and, since it thinks up what I usually take to be other minds, it only makes sense that I think them up to perceive the same things that I take to be mind-independent?
Quoting RogueAI
Quoting RogueAI
You're making the strong claim that mind/consciousness can't come from matter, so the burden of proof of that claim is definitely on you. If Bostrom makes the claim that mind/consciousness does emerge from matter, then the burden of proof of that is his. I'm not sure if he's making the claim directly, but his sim argument depends on it, and he's claiming the sim argument, so the burden is still there, as it is on you for your strong claim.
You make a second claim, that sim theory is false if your assertion is true. To me, that's another thing in need of proof. You arrange matter into a person and somehow a mind thingy finds it. What's different about the simulation that the same thing wouldn't happen, that the simulated thing would be conscious the same way you claim to be, despite it being attached only to a simulated physical?
I agree that 'klick a rock' is a catchy phrase, but since the experience of stubbing your toe is identical in the two views, kicking a rock demonstrates nothing. It seems to be a cheap counter to rocks being declared not-real.
Quoting Patterner
That's a far stronger argument for mind independent stuff. It doesn't refute solipsism since there aren't other minds also agreeing on the rock that you haven't even noticed yet. But similar arguments can be used to refute solipsism.
Quoting fishfryMore to the point, why would anybody (even Bostrom) accept the SH? People choose a view either because there is evidence or because they want it to be true. The former is a rational motivation and the latter is rationalized. Bostrom's argument seems to attempt to bend the facts horribly to make the hypothesis plausible. This suggests that he wants it to be for some reason, but I cannot fathom why somebody would want to actually believe that. OK, I see why one might want to appear to believe it: Because of the popularity of the idea from movie fiction. He has gained money/status/notoriety from pushing a view that nobody else is in a coherent manner. Elon Musk is a decent example of an incoherent hypothesis, and he's not doing it for the notoriety that he already had. Without knowing it, he pushes for VR, and I can see reasons why somebody might choose that.
The world simulating us is not constrained to the computability laws that constrain our world. It is thus constrained in Bostrom's view, but not in general. It's sort of a computing version of deism. The creating simulator starts it up, but then steps back and never interferes and lays no demands on what the occupants do, nor does it make any promises to them. The typically posited god usually does have promises and demands, but not necessarily under deism.
Quoting fishfry
I haven't got round to replying to that endless topic yet, but Tegmark is more appropriately discussed here since it has little to do with supertasks.
You say category error: Please explain that without begging a different view. You do explain it there, but you are very much begging a different view when doing so. Tegmark is saying that mathematics (not any mental concept of it) IS the territory. Our abstract usage of mathematics is the map, but that abstraction is not what is the universe.
It's not much different than all these centuries where the universe was considered to be an 'object', a thing contained by time and in need of creation. They all of a sudden a new view comes along and the category changes. It isn't an object created in time, but rather a structure that contains time. Most people still hold the 'contained by time' view since it is more intuitive. Tegmark is doing something similar: changing the categorical relations. Refute it from its own premises, but not by begging different ones.
Your refusal to apply the language you use for human activities to something non-human doesn't mean that the non-human thing isn't doing them.
Ms Pacman is you. It's a VR game, and you enjoy eating the dots, else you'd not be cramming quarters into the machine. It is a straight up case of dualism. Ms Pacman's consciousness is yours. She is the avatar, who doesn't enjoy the dots any more than you claim your physical avatar enjoys the ice cream.
Searle says exactly that, since what your avatar does instantiates feeling in your mind. Intentionality comes from that mind and not from the avatar. Likewise, Ms Pacman makes no choices on her own, since the intentionality comes from the mind (you) who is obviously very much enjoying eating the dots.
Perhaps this is the disconnect. In what way is Searle a physicalist? Usually the term is used for a physical monist: All physics (including people) operate by the laws of physics, every bit of which is arguably computational.; Searle perhaps posits a different kind of matter that he still labels 'physics', but the physics community doesn't since there's been no demonstration of it.
Have I claimed beliefs? Do I believe the rock exists independent of me? Do you know enough of my beliefs to answer that?
What's the point of sharing them? I try to understand the alternatives, and point out those alternatives to those asserting that some particular view must be the case. I don't think I assert that any particular view must be the case, but maybe I do sometimes. Like I said, I shy away from something like BIV due to it being empty of information, but not because it must be otherwise.
No, that's if VR is true. SH is not modelled by a video game.
If simulated, it is simulated in some logical way; perhaps we just don't understand it.
For the purposes of this thread, I'm just being agnostic about whether consciousness comes from matter. People should be agnostic about whether matter even exists (we can't be wrong that mind and consciousness exist), but of course very few are. Almost everyone believes matter exists.
If anyone is asserting matter exists the burden of proof is on them. If they are also asserting mind and consciousness can come from matter somehow, they have an even higher burden of proof.
Yes, this reality is the particular dream the minds have come up with and work unconsciously to maintain coherency. Or there's only one mind, and this reality is what it's dreaming up and we're all dissociated aspects of it, or there's a god and a bunch of minds and this reality is what the god wants us to experience.
Quoting Patterner
Possibly. Idealism is going to have to posit that for some reason, we're all dreaming of a reality where matter seems to exist. This, to me, seems like less of a problem than the Hard Problem.
Me? I make no such claim. I've made the opposite claim. I say that consciousness is physical but not computational. I hope that's clear. Or was that for the other tagged handles?
Quoting noAxioms
Yeah that's a real puzzler. It clearly seems to be going on a lot, so it's true. We just don't know how it works. Sim theory is false because consciousness is not computational. You're right that I assert both those claims.
By the way, do you believe in intelligent design? If you said that in polite company you'd be shunned. What's the difference between than and sim theory?
Quoting noAxioms
When I run a simulation of gravity on my computer, nearby bowling balls are not suddenly attracted to it by any amount greater than what can be accounted for by the mass of the computer. A simulation of gravity does not implement gravity. Simulations of brains therefore do not necessarily implement minds. Not saying they don't, just that it's not the case that they necessarily do.
Quoting noAxioms
Not the point I was trying to make. The question is, why do we mock the Godly street preacher, and venerate the simulation theory TED talker?
Again, do you believe in intelligent design? Nothing provokes scientists more than that idea, they hate it. While gladly advocating simulation theory.
Simulation theory is a theological belief. That's the point I was making. Not, why do people believe in simulation, but why do so many who believe in simulation reject intelligent design or God? I see no difference between "God did it" and "The Great Simulator" did it, except that the GS is required to be a computation, and that makes it less likely than God, because God requires one less assumption.
Quoting noAxioms
This I utterly reject. Simulation theory says we are computations. That can only be understood as computation as we currently understand it. Turing machines, finite state automata, etc.
If someone is saying we're computations but computations defined differently than they are in computer science, the burden is on them to make that remark coherent.
Quoting noAxioms
At least Bostrom agrees with me in that regard, then. The word computation has a very specific meaning. For example if the Great Simulator can solve the Halting problem, it's not a computation. Maybe it's a computation with an oracle for the Halting problem. If so, then simulation proponents should make that assumption explicit.
Quoting noAxioms
Well then you are agreeing with me. It's a theological claim.
Quoting noAxioms
So the Great Simulator doesn't ask Abraham to kill his son? Or not mess around with his neighbor's wife? You are stretching a bit now.
Quoting noAxioms
As it happens, lately I just respond to my mentions and often have no idea what thread I'm in. But Tegmark's MUH is such a category error that I can't imagine he's serious. I'm sure others have made that point. That MUH is a category error, not necessarily that Tegmark's a troll.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, the map is not the territory. Anyone claiming that the map is the territory is making a category error. I don't think I need to explain that, it's pretty clear. What map is its own territory? Is it a map a map of itself? This is word play. The map is not the territory. I hardly need to defend that proposition.
Quoting noAxioms
But now we know better. It doesn't need creation, only simulation!! /s
Quoting noAxioms
Having seen what mathematicians mean by structures, from groups, topological spaces, measure spaces, and the like, I find it impossible to comprehend a point of view that claims that these things are flesh and blood. A mathematical structure is a set with some operations and some rules. They can model certain aspects of reality. They are not reality itself.
Quoting noAxioms
Your browser does not have an inner life. We've been having a very sensible conversation, but I can't join you in this belief of yours that Ms. Pac-Man experiences pleasure. I literally can't believe you are saying that to me.
Quoting noAxioms
I just can't hold up my end of this part of the conversation. What are you talking about? Perhaps if you have been inspired by something you read to assert such an absurdity, you can give me a reference so that I can regain my bearings.
Quoting noAxioms
Oh I see your point! Thank you for explaining that. She gets her consciousness from me. I enjoy making Ms. Pac-Man eat the dots. I can see that. Ms. Pac-Man derives her inner life from mine.
That is a very interesting idea.
You raise a question that I'm not sure I can answer. What is the distinction between my enjoying myself playing the game, and Ms Pac-Man's enjoyment of eating dots? After all, I try to eat the dots and I try to avoid the monsters. I'm the one who has Ms. Pac-Man's experiences, but those are (in your view) her experiences nonetheless. My experience is her experience.
I haven't got the words or concepts to argue that point but it's a very interesting way to think about it.
At least I now see what you mean.
Is this a form of pantheism? I enjoy throwing a rock, and by your theory, the rock enjoys being thrown. Not because it has an inner life, but because it inherits or represents my enjoyment. Is that a fair characterization of your point? I must give this some more thought. I don't think I agree with you, but it is definitely interesting.
Quoting noAxioms
But that's his argument against the Chinese room understanding Chinese. He says that we humans provide the meaning or intentionality. He says that the room does NOT have meaning or intentionality.
You are turning that argument on its head, are you not?
Quoting noAxioms
I believe I saw him in a video lecture say that he thought there's something about life that gives rise to consciousness, but bit flipping is not sufficient. I might be misremembering or mischaracterizing his position.
Quoting noAxioms
Oh no no no no no. Physics is arguably computational, but also arguably not computational. I argue that it is not. Physics is the wrong word here. Physics is the historically contingent human activity of Aristotle and Newton and Einstein explaining why bowling balls fall down. The ultimate nature of the world itself is not necessarily computational. I assume we're talking about the ultimate nature of the world, and not just our latest theory of physics.
Of course if I stipulated that the physical world is computational and that I am a physicalist, it would follow that I believe the world is computational. But I doubt very much that the world is computational. Computation is far too restrictive. Perhaps the world solves the Halting problem, perhaps it solves some other noncomputable problem, and that's how it manages to work. We just don't know.
Quoting noAxioms
Not at all. Plain old matter. But not computational. You at least qualified your claim by saying that physics is arguably computational. It's also arguably not.
Quoting noAxioms
You succeeded in making me understand your point about Ms. Pac-Man and gave me something to think about. I'm no longer disturbed.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok ... not entirely sure about this. Isn't it the opposite? If my mind is primary and my experiences are an illusion, the illusion-giver, the simulator, may withdraw my reality at any moment. If there's a simulator, they may get bored of providing me with this interesting reality and unplug me, and I'll cease to be.
And if VR is true, the same thing might happen, but my untethered mind will remain, but devoid of experiences.
Have I got that right?
ps -- When I play chess, do you claim that the chess pieces care whether I win or lose? I'm the one who cares. They're just wood or plastic, or bit patterns in the computer.
I reject your Ms. Pac-Man thesis as well as your misinterpretation of the Chinese room. [But at least I now understand it!]
The humans care. The objects in a video game or chess game don't care. The Chinese room doesn't understand Chinese.
Quoting jasonm
Why would it be helpful? If you help a moth shed its cocoon you will doom it to weakness in nature and death. "Helping" us out may be contradictory to the purpose of the simulation.
On top of that, a simulation of this magnitude would more likely have an end goal, similar to the concept of emerging a god out of the determinism of this chaotic system. That "god" wasn't the start of everything, but instead being the goal; us, or a collective of intelligences throughout the universe merging together civilisations and technology into a final form so fundamental that it would be able to manifest reality on its own, i.e the equivalent of a god. That could be a purpose of a higher being simulating us.
Or, we're observed and there's no interest in helping us out because that's not the purpose of the simulation. It could be simulating for the argument of how to avoid a downfall of society, as a demonstration for people outside the simulation to understand the importance of a certain societal practice that avoids self-destruction and that our simulation is a case-point to show what happens without that societal practice in order to teach young and ignorant of the reasons why they implemented it in society.
The list goes on for the purposes of a simulation and very few would constitute a reason to interfere and "help" us.
Quoting jasonm
Why must the miracles or attributes of such anomalies be understandable or within a human concept? Maybe black holes and quantum superpositions and virtual particles are just such anomalies. Or if the simulation is so fundamental that it basically simulates the most fundamental aspects of reality itself, we wouldn't be able to find anything odd as everything is consistent with the laws of physics.
But on top of that, there's a problem with the frame of reference. If all our science and all our knowledge about reality comes from the foundation of this simulation, then our frame of reference is the reality of the simulation itself. What are you supposed to compare it to? You don't have an original to compare the map against, to reference Baudrillard's ideas.
Quoting jasonm
This is the problem with the simulation argument. It stems from a logical argument of probability about what we human's are likely to do, or what is likely to happen if technology evolves, but it ignores the physical nature of computational power. Yes, there might be computational power found in technology that we've yet to invent, but the calculation required for handling data down to the Planck scale at all positions of reality is so extreme it reaches either infinity or requires the same size as reality itself. Whatever it is, it would most likely have to be something beyond what is capable within this reality, something within some higher form of reality in which manifesting our reality isn't that big of a deal.
Then, we can also view it through the concept of The Matrix and Dark City. In which the system that handles the simulation simply guard us from ever knowing about it. Since the ones doing the simulation have absolute control, they can simply tune our knowledge away from us, leaving us able to see these breaks in the simulation, but we're simply "edited" to not spot them.
That's also similar to Westworld:
Quoting jasonm
Yes, as said, the argument is merely a logical one about progression of technology, but ignores computational problems. It's also based on humans conducting the simulation and we wouldn't need to simulate at this magnitude for any purposes other than creation itself, and if so, it really doesn't matter if we're in a simulation as our reality is simply the only reality we know, similar to the holographic universe theory.
There are an abundance of reasons concerning efficiency as to why having a simulated universe is greater than having a quantum universe. In such a case we have a lens unto some great prospect that is stealthily very smart and streamlined.
It may be more a real simulation than you think, maybe it does seem like a simulation, and things don't seem like they are completely quantum, but none of us have all the knowledge required to perceive the universe this way.
The burden of proof rests on you if you believe the universe is/looks completely quantum(or as you may put it, 'real').
I put this to ChatGPT4. Have a look at what it said.
My example is memorizing words/symbols without knowing their meaning, only to learn later how to read them. That's proof of information independent of your mind, a sort of refutation of solipsistic idealism.
Quoting RogueAIBostrom seems to presume this. If they do manage to simulate a human enough to appear conscious, those that deny consciousness can come from matter will simply deny that the simulated person is conscious. A successful simulation won't change their opinion.
Quoting fishfryNo, not you. No quote of yours was in the bit there to which I was replying.
What do you mean by that? I mean, technically, none of physics is computational if done to a sufficient level of detail, but I don't think that level of detail is needed in a simulation.
Computation is classical and physics has been shown to be not.
Not too much. Both are deliberate choices of interesting mathematics. The vast majority of possible universe are not interesting.
I didn't say implement them. I said that they would find the familiar pattern. If nothing is known about how that works, then you can't say it wouldn't happen with the sim.
There's a lot more veneration of the God talkers than you suggest here, and if Bostrom screamed his assertions from a box in a subway station, he'd get a lot less attention. He's getting mocked plenty in topics like this one. Bostrom is venerated at the Ted talk because the audience is full of people who's seen Inception and think that's what he's talking about.
I'm gladly advocating it?? Bostrom claims we are in a sim of us: The world simulating us is the same as the one simulated. That's not ID since the design is already made and it is just mimicry. But in general, if you admit that we know nothing of the world running the sim, then the idea is no different than deism.
Is it? If we can know nothing of those running it, how do we know it is a computation? At what point does it cease to be sim theory and just become straight up god:"whoomp, there it is" theory?
It seems a lot of my answers agree with yours, but your tone suggests disagreement with my replies.
OK. You have a tighter definition of the term. You must call it something else if it is done, but not done as computation as you currently understand it. Do quantum computers qualify? Are they (if one is actually created) beyond our current understanding? Can they run a simulation, or would a different world need to be used? Can a quantum computer solve the halting problem for a Turing machine?
I mean, the god people do it all the time. God created physics, be it computable or not. Time as well, and general causality. That sounds an awful lot like a simulation mechanism to me. Old school says the sim began ~6000 years ago, but lately, in an attempt to avoid all out denial of science, they've backed off to a view of the project starting at the big bang, and perhaps with initial conditions that bring us about, because it's all about us after all.
That's a big difference BTW between god and a sim: A sim is run to see what happens, to gain information. God creates something where he knows exactly what will happen, and he wants that to happen. He gains no knowledge by running the universe experiment, at least not the god typically asserted.
Deism isn't theological. It would be if those running the simulation implemented say a moral code which they expect to be followed by the subjects being simulated, "or else ...".
That's messing with the simulation, violating the causality rules and such. If it works like that, then its a VR for the great simulator, and the rest of us are NPCs being asked to kill our sons.
Him redefining the categories is not a category error. You're begging a different definition. Mathematics is not a map in the view.
The MUH predicts that the majority of consciousness are Boltzmann brains, reducing the hypothesis to where it cannot be simultaneously believed and justified. That's a huge hit to the idea, and one which he must be aware, and has perhaps attempted a refinement, but it wasn't addressed in the book.
A simulation is a created thing. It exists in time. There's no evidence that our universe exists in time.
You see that Ms Pacman is you, but you still deny your inner life?
A bit like you saying that your experience is the same experience had by the body of fishfry. Well, fishfry body doesn't have experience separate from 'you', and similarly Ms Paceman doesn't have separate experience. She does become a zombie while the game isn't being played, zooming around randomly and getting killed in short order.
It does? Where did I say anything like that? Because I intentionally caused it to move? That's different than me being the rock while doing so, making it move on its own.
Pantheism? What's that got to do with it? Do you mean panpsychism?
A dualist has a mind and a body, and typically the body has presumed boundaries which usually don't include the rock, but there's no actual hard definition of where the boundary is since there's nothing physical about it. So for instance, are the clothes I'm wearing part of me? The usual presumption is yes, despite that probably not being the answer if it is asked as a question.
"Where does 'you'" physically stop? It's more of a language thing than a physics thing. I typically don't include the rock as part of 'me', and you probably don't either. I could open an entire topic about this.
Searle also plays the game of refusing to apply a word to something nonhuman doing exactly what the word means when a human does it. That's begging his conclusion.
I looked at the wiki page and the argument seems to have been updated. The guy doing it (instead of the computer) cannot pass the Turing test since speed is an issue. Somebody who takes 20 years to reply to 'hello' is probably not going to pass a Turing test. Speed up time in the box and this objection goes away. No, the man in the box does not understand the conversation any more than does the CPU in the AI or than does a human brain cell.
Not talking about a human activity. I'm talking about the actual nature of the world, not how we describe that nature.
That's a description of VR, not a simulation. Mind is primary in that scenario. It is real, and the rest illusion.
With sim, the world behavior (physics) is primary, and things proceed according to the rules, without outside interference or intentionality. I have done both kinds. They're very different.
That sounds more like a sim, yes. If they unplug it, everything/everybody is gone, but perhaps still on disk somewhere. It could be restarted 2 years from now and the simulated beings would never notice the interruption. They very much would notice if it was a VR.
It would be like quitting PacMan. Devoid of experience of the pacman world, but not devoid of experience.
Impressive but meaningless, as all LLM output is.
Not because machines could never be conscious. I believe they can't, but I could be wrong.
Rather, because the very design of LLMs renders them literally moronic. They're autocomplete on steroids. They crunch a huge pile of text and make a big lookup table (conceptually) that says, "If you see this phrase, this other phrase is likely to follow."
Then the programmers decide whether they always want it to pick the most likely phrase, which gives a boring LLM; or the least likely phrase, which gives a crazy but interesting LLM. They typically tune it till it outputs seemingly interesting blocks of text that are -- by the very design of the system -- utterly meaningless if you are looking for insight, but superficially clever looking.
For factual data they can be excellent. "Write an essay on medieval sports." But for insight, "Are LLMs intelligent," they spout nonsense, no matter how seemingly clever.
I'm not saying anything that people don't already know about LLMs. What I wrote is commonplace knowledge among people who work with LLMs.
Ok I might have been confused.
Quoting noAxioms
Oh ok these definitions are changing.
Simulation, in the sense of simulation theory, means that my reality (VR) or my very self (Simulation) are exactly being created by the Great Simulator (GS from now on). If the GS is only approximating me or my reality, what is being approximated?
Simulation is in fact not the right word. We have simulations of gravity, simulations of star formation, simulations of elections, simulations of economies. The word simulation is always accompanied by "of." If there is a simulation, it's a simulation "of" something.
In simulation theory, there is no "of." The simulation is exact and perfect already. So the right word is instantiation, not simulation.
So when I say that intelligence, or mind, or the world, is physical but not computational, I mean that the universe does something that is physical -- involves the atoms and the quarks and the quantum fields and whatever future physics will be discovered -- that transcends our current understanding of computation. It's a Turing machine with an oracle for consciousness, maybe that's a good way to put it.
So my conception is not dualistic, not supernatural, not non-physical. It's entirely physical. But it's not subject to the profound limits of Turing machines, finite state automata, and any of the other things that we currently think of as "computation." The universe is transcending the [ul=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis]Church-Turing thesis[/url].
That's my view of it, my conception of what's going on. Physical, but not a computation as we currently understand it.
Of course I entirely agree with you that we can simulate the heck out of a lot of things via approximation and abstraction. But we can't instantiate consciousness with a computation, as computation is currently understood.
Is my position somewhat clear? The world and the mind are physical but not computational, in our present understanding of computation.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, but that's not how the TED talkers would see it. They'd mock intelligent design, yet believe in simulation.
[And again, I hope that we are agreed that a simulation of gravity or a simulation of the stock market is not the same use of the word as the GS simulating my mind for me. The latter is a complete instantiation, not just an approximation].
Quoting noAxioms
Running gravity simulations does not attract nearby bowling balls. "Find the familiar pattern," not sure what you are getting at.
Are you equivocating the word simulation? Simulation theory does not mean the same as when we simulate the Super Bowl to predict the winner. It means to instantiate. The GS instantiates my mind and/or my experience.
Quoting noAxioms
I didn't see it, I thought it would just aggravate me. I have a tropism against trendiness.
Maybe I should just go read Bostrom. I did take a run at his paper once and gave up after a while. I should try again, I might learn something.
Quoting noAxioms
Right. That is a confusing equivocation of the word. It's not like when the physicists simulate the early conditions of the universe. Simulation theory is what God does to instantiate the universe. Which is why simulation theory is essentially a theological speculation.
Apologies if I confused your views with Bostrom's.
A thing can't simulate itself. Unless, by that definition, I'm simulating myself just by sitting here and being me.
Simulation's a bad word. I always want to ask the simulation proponents, simulation of what?
I had a funny thought. Just as all waves must travel in a medium; yet light is a wave that does not require a medium; perhaps the GS simulates without the need for an "of" to simulate.
I think the word should be instantiate, because that is what's being conveyed.
Quoting noAxioms
We agree then. Neil deGrasse Tyson and George Smoot believe in simulation theory. And Tyson, at least, would object to the claim that "God does it all, and we are His flock of lambs." Bothers me that people who should know better advocate these ideas.
Quoting noAxioms
Ah. My understanding is that simulation theory claims it's all a computation. If I'm wrong about that I should correct my thinking. I will go look at Bostrom's paper, maybe he says something about that.
Quoting noAxioms
I think we're in agreement. Apologies if I'm unnecessarily oppositional.
Quoting noAxioms
As I understand it, quantum computers have no more computational power than classical ones. They run more efficiently in terms of complexity theory. But any function that a quantum computer can compute can already be computed by a classical computer. And the proof is that quantum computers are often simulated on classical hardware. They run slowly, but in principle they do the same things either way.
A quantum computer most definitely can not solve the Halting problem. They can do certain problems much faster than classical computers, but a classical computer could solve the same problem if given enough time.
Quoting noAxioms
Right. And simulation theory is God restricted to our current notions of computation. That's my argument. It makes God the more likely hypothesis, by virtue of requiring one less assumption.
Quoting noAxioms
Maybe God created us all then sits back and watches. Like a kid with an ant farm, do they still make those? Why yes, they do. https://www.antsalive.com/shop.htm
That's another thing about Bostrom's argument. That the GS runs "ancestor simulations." First, WE don't run ancestor simulations, though we certainly could. Get some programmers and some sociologists in a room and they could work it out. Like Sim City, the game.
But why should the GS run ancestor simulations? Isn't it rather arrogant of us to impute motives to the GS as if the GS thinks and feels like us? Maybe we are characters in someone's video game. We play video games for entertainment, not to gain insight into our ancestors.
Quoting noAxioms
Matter of definition I guess. I don't think theology necessarily needs to come with a moral code. Just needs a supernatural being that instantiates the world. Like the GS.
Quoting noAxioms
I'm not sure I remember what my point was with that question. But why not? Bostrom's GS likes to run "ancestor simulations." Why on earth would they do that? Why on earth would WE imagine that they do that? Maybe they are the cause of sickness and war and suffering. Maybe they are sadists. That's a more realistic hypothesis than that we're an ancestor simulation.
Quoting noAxioms
He says the world literally is a mathematical structure. I have had the opportunity to see a handful of modern mathematical structures, and I don't think the world is one of those. It's a category error. So I should go read Tegmark too, another paper I took a run at some years ago without feeling the magic.
Quoting noAxioms
But even a Boltzmann brain is not a mathematical structure. It's an implementation of one. Mathematical structures by definition are sets with operations and rules. They are abstract. They may have some earthly representations, but the representations are not the structures. A bag of groceries is not a set. Sets are far stranger than that, and sets do not exist in the physical world.
Quoting noAxioms
Block universe? Time is an illusion? Maybe. Can't refute it.
Quoting noAxioms
No, by the time I was done last night I rejected your concept. Same reason that my chess pieces do not care if they get captured or win or lose the game. I'm the one who cares. They're just inanimate pieces of plastic or bit patterns on my computer screen run by a chess algorithm.
Quoting noAxioms
I was momentarily happy that I understood the point you were making, but I now reject it completely. The chess pieces don't care. The baseball doesn't care when someone hits it out of the park. And which side is it on? The batter is happy but the pitcher is unhappy. And the baseball has no emotions at all.
Quoting noAxioms
I thought that is your thesis. That Ms. Pac-Man is imbued with my own pleasure in winning the game.
But of course that's not right. It's just a video game run by a circuit board. (And so are we, according to the computational theory of reality that I reject).
Quoting noAxioms
Yes did I write pantheism? Well my fingers have a mind of their own, maybe you're right :-)
Yes pansychism. How else can the rock, the baseball, the chess pieces, and Ms. Pac-Man experience my pleasure in the game?
I think you are not convincing me of this thesis, though you did have me going for a while last night.
Quoting noAxioms
You seem to include Ms Pac-Man as you. Isn't that what you said? Am I perhaps not understanding?
Quoting noAxioms
Well yes, this comes up in these discussions. We compute, computers compute, so we're computers. The Chinese room speaks Chinese, who am I and who is Searle to say it doesn't understand what it's doing?
That's the argument against my position. My Chinese friend speaks Chinese and my Chinese room speaks Chinese, what's the difference.
I say there's a difference. Searle says there's a difference. Everyone agues with Searle and I.
Quoting noAxioms
Well we're back to LLMs. They're not very bright but many people these days are impressed. Searle of course did not put his argument in terms of computers, but today we could literally program a Chinese room. It's Google translate. Which in general isn't very good, language translation is a hard problem. But I don't think we should let execution speed muddy the argument. I'm willing to stipulate that the Chinese room is as fast as it needs to be. It still doesn't understand Chinese. And a few million professional and amateur philosophers disagree with me.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok.
Quoting noAxioms
I may be missing some subtleties. I thought VR is Descartes's clever deceiver, who gives me an illusion of all my experience, yet my mind is still mine. And Sim says that my minds also is simulated/instantiated by the GS so that there really is no me outside the GS.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes right, so I believe I'm understanding you.
Quoting noAxioms
Memory?
Well this convo's getting long.
Apologies again if my tone is oppositional sometimes, it's how I try to figure out what I think.
PS -- I looked up Bostrom's paper.
https://simulation-argument.com/
The very title of the paper is: Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?.
If by "computer" Bostrom means something other than a computer as commonly understood, he should say that explicitly.
So my remarks on computability stand. Bostrom's thesis that the world and my mind are computational, as the word is understood today, is an unwarranted and probably false assumption; and in any event, needs evidence.
I put out some definitions in my topic
Simulation theory and VR theory are very different, but you seem to be using simulation for both. I often shorten the former to 'sim'. I am OK with defining GS as the world running the sim or the VR. With VR, you are in the GS world (but not necessarily of it), and with sim you are not.
Depends on if its a sim or a VR. My topic covers this.
Well, in sim theory, it is a simulation of at least me, so I disagree with your assertion that there is no 'of' there. In VR theory, it is the creation of my artificial experience.
Fine. You don't buy into the possibility of simulation theory since it contradicts other values which you hold to be true.
You say there might be 'future physics' discovered that completes your model, but the GS might already have that understanding, and might have built their sim in such a way as to leverage it.
Besides the ridicule fallacy, how does that differ from the way I see it?
Well, you deny the possibility of the latter, but I find it to still be the same use of the world. A simulation of our physics is necessarily an approximation since there is no way to represent anything physical exactly, so for instance it is probably going to be discreet physics with a preferred frame of reference.
How would anybody go about doing that?
In sim theory, there is no 'my mind' to instantiate. It is not necessarily a simulation of something that also exists in the GS world. Most simulations are of nonexistent things. I suppose the weather is an exception to this since the initial state is taken from the GS world, not as a work of intentional design.
Good, because I think Bostrom's hypothesis falls flat.
That's well known. Godel showed it for instance.
I mean, they can, but at far slower efficiency. I wrote a program that essentially simulated itself for profiling purposes. You could simulate the execution of any code (including itself), but it ran at about a 1/10000th of the normal speed, and optimized that to about 1/40th the normal speed. That could simulate itself, but per Godel, it could not be used to see if it finishes.
Bostrom is clear on this. It is a simulation of ancestral history. I mock that suggestion in my topic.
I can't see a simulation not having a model to run. There's always an 'of', else the task is undefined. So I could run a simulation of a three legged creature to see which kinds of gaits it might find natural. There is no creature in the GS matching the one being simulated, but there's still an 'of'.
Tyson just seems to ride on Bostrom's paper ("<-- what he said"), which I doubt he understands.
Smoot knows what he's talking about at least, but I could not find a paper/article with his hypothesis to get even a glimmer of what he's suggesting or what evidence he claims supports it. Perhaps something concerning the CMB. It's all you-tube, and I don't get my physics from you tube.
Bostrom suggests that. A different sim theory might not. We know nothing of the GS, so I agree, it differs little from deism. Bostrom says we know everything about GS world since they us in 'the future'.
Agree
It is only this constricted if one presumes the GS world has the same constraints as the world we know.
He says the GS is us, so of course they think and feel like us. But I agree, I see no reason why they would find a need to create a fictional world framed in some past century, a simulation of the scale he suggests. It's not like it would produce any actual events that took place in the history of the GS world. What would be the staring date of such a sim? Last Tuesday?
Not possible given your stated beliefs. Only the players can be conscious, not the NPCs. But actually, I have suggested similar things myself, claiming to be a p-zombie in a world where not all are, because I don't see this hard problem that so many others find so obvious. Clearly they have something I don't. So OK, I'm an NPC.
So a sim run by a world devoid of sickness and war, but populated by sadists with a need to create ant farms to torture? I can't see a world populated by such beings being free of natural misery.
Yes. He recategorizes mathematics. The hypothesis has severe issues, but category error isn't one of them.
Not under MUH they aren't. Being abstract requires them to supervene on an abstractor, making them non-fundamental.
It would be be part of one under MUH, just like one would be part of our universe if there were some out there.
OK, you you have a definition of 'me' that doesn't include any avatar.
Does your physical body enjoy the ice cream? You didn't answer that question. I want to see if you're consistent.
By being an avatar of a mind, but that isn't panpsychism I think, but I don't really understand that view. I suppose the rock is no different from a chess piece. I cannot move it by mind alone, but that's also true of my fingers.
I think you are not convincing me of this thesis, though you did have me going for a while last night.
Yes, I can extend my definition of 'me' to any boundary I wish. It's mostly just a language designation. There are no physical rules about it.
Yes, the system understands Chinese. A part of the system doesn't necessarily understand it, just like the CPU of my computer doesn't know how to open a text document. That doesn't mean that the computer doesn't open the document, unless that you define 'to open a document' as only something a human does, and an unspecified alternate word must be used if the computer is doing the same thing.
The Chinese room, as described, seems to be in a sort of sensory deprivation environment. Surely there are questions you can ask it that bear this out. They have machines now that officially pass the Turing test, and some of the hardest questions are along such lines.
An LLM cannot pass a Turing test. Something like ChatGTP does not claim to understand language. It's not how they work, but maybe it's not how we work either.
OK.
Yes, like that.
If Pacman was fully immersive, and I had been playing all my life, then I am essentially a mind connected only to pacman. If the game is unplugged, then all the hookups are still there, but I am left in a sensory deprivation state. If not hooked to a different feed, then it stays that way. I of course have no control over it. I cannot take off the VR headset because the connections required to do so have been severed in order to connect fully to pacman.
Pretty sure he means 'as commonly understood'. It doesn't mean that all sim theories suggest that, but with him it kind of does.
One could argue that the claim that consciousness is not computational is the one in need of evidence. I mean, a perfect simulation of our physics is not computational, but consciousness seems to operate at a classical electro-chemical level, and that is computational. I don't assert it to be thus, so it's a possibility, not a hard claim.
I agree. It often doesn't matter. If the simulator only simulates my experience but my mind is outside that, it's VR. If the simulator also instantiates my mind, it's the simulator. Have I got that right?
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. Thought I read it but I could read it again. I did object to your idea of approximation. My understanding is that simulation theory creates reality, it does not approximate it. Which is why instantiation is a better word than simulation.
Quoting noAxioms
Creation of, yes. We agree on that. NOT an approximation of; but rather the creation of. The exact creation, not an approximation.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't necessarily reject it, I just note that it's a claim that God created the heavens and the earth, but was constrained to be a Turing machine. So it's just a theological speculation, and not deserving of the TED talkers' reverence.
Quoting noAxioms
Sure. But the simulation theorists like to imagine that the GS has motives we can understand ("ancestor simulations") and operates via the laws of computation as we understand them. And also the laws of physics. If you are saying that maybe the GS has physics that we don't know about, there's no telling what they could do. It's just a magical speculation at this point.
Quoting noAxioms
I'm afraid I'm not sure exactly what thesis you are arguing. My apologies.
I do use the ridicule fallacy. The exact same people who disdain God love the Great Simulator. I find that viewpoint lacking in self-awareness.
Quoting noAxioms
Well God, or nature, has instantiated my mind. I have no doubt of that. Call it God, call it the GS. What difference does it make, except that God is not constrained by the limits of computation?
I perfectly well agree that my mind has somehow been instantiated. I simply object to the claim that my mind could have been instantiated by a digital computer.
Quoting noAxioms
https://www.betstatz.com/simulator
This was the first of many links I found. It's commonly done. Simulation to predict sporting events is done all the time. Economies, the stock market, etc. Standard technology.
Quoting noAxioms
You have a subjective experience of your mind. Any theory of mind has to explain it or hold it as a mystery.
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Ok then we're in total agreement.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok.
Quoting noAxioms
Me too. Perhaps we are entirely in agreement.
Quoting noAxioms
Well that's the thing. Bostrom says that we are a simulation. And the question is, of what? If he said we are an instantiation, that would at least make more sense.
But again, I think we are agreeing.
Quoting noAxioms
Smoot did a TED talk. I get all my physics from Youtube these days.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, I agree that if mind is physical but not computational, a new definition of computation must be in our future somewhere. Perhaps some kind of continuous or real number based computation. Turing machines are hopelessly limited.
Quoting noAxioms
I do believe there's a lot about the world we don't yet know, and may never know.
Quoting noAxioms
The funny thing is that, other than civil war re-enactors. WE don't do ancestor simulations.
Quoting noAxioms
My beliefs can be wrong. I could be a Boltzmann brain.
Quoting noAxioms
It's not a mathematical structure. A mathematical structure is a set with some operations and properties. Purely abstract conception.
Quoting noAxioms
Umm ... no. My body processes the nutrients in the ice cream. My consciousness experiences the enjoyment. Even if pleasure is a chemical response in the brain, my experience is the pleasure. The chemicals in the brain don't have experiences, I do. Well I see that I'm getting in trouble here.
Quoting noAxioms
The chess pieces don't enjoy playing the game, I can't understand why you are seemingly promoting that view.
Quoting noAxioms
The me is the me that experiences. Also my body, but if I grant you that you'll say that Ms. Pac-Man's part of my body too. Don't know.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok then this is our disagreement. I'm with Searle, I say the system understands nothing, any more than the computer running a chess program understands chess.
Quoting noAxioms
It doesn't care about the document, it doesn't know the meaning of the document, it just flips bits.
Quoting noAxioms
The Turing test is weak, and the weakest part is the humans. A basic chatbot will cause humans to trust it with their deepest secrets, as Weizenbaum discovered with ELIZA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
Quoting noAxioms
An LLM passed the bar exam. That's impressive.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, I understand the distinction then.
Quoting noAxioms
Maybe I'm a brain in a vat. But that's a nihilistic idea.
Quoting noAxioms
Right. That's my point. Simulator = God constrained to the rules of a Turing machine. A terribly limited conception.
Quoting noAxioms
There are no structures in the brain that implement Turing machines. The neurons don't work that way.
Quoting noAxioms
As a Turing machine or a digital computer? I don't see how anyone could make that claim. Although I do see many people making that claim!
If I try to simulate our actual world, I must approximate it since perfect simulation is impossible, requiring, among other things, infinite precision variables. So Lara Croft has, among other traits, square legs. All very crude. It gets better in later years, but still an approximation of what it wants to be.
If I simulate Conway's game of life (not our actual world, but one with very simple rules), well, it necessarily would have bounds, but otherwise would not be done as an approximation.
No, operates under the laws of computation as they (in the far future) understand them. Not under our current understanding.
Agree with that. Hence my aversion to magic.
I agree with this. I'm certainly not promoting sim theory.
Both will always be an approximation. Any simulation of something 'real' must be. The physics of the simulation will be different than the physics of the GS. If the two are close enough, then the simulation can achieve its goals. Hence weather forecasting not being a total waste of time.
That's fine, but none of those has actually produced a real game before it was played. Sure, it can be used to set odds. Sure, it gets the final score right sometimes, but never the way the score gets that way. Of course the stock market is similar, but one can simulate the effect of certain news on the market. It can simulate a panic, and help test methods to control such instabilities.
Don't need a theory. Just a simulator. If it works, I don't have to know how it works. If it can't work, then it wont.
"of ancestral history". His words. A fictional one at best, just like the football simulator. It's not going to show any historical events we know unless you start the sim just before they happen. If they start the simulation far enough back, there won't even be humans in it, ever.
Yea, I saw those links. I didn't watch the talk, because I don't get my physics from there.
I still have no idea what Smoot is proposing.
Bostrom thinks mind is computational. I see few detractors that claim that it cannot be, and thus he must be wrong.
I'm not sure if LARPing qualifies as a simulation. They all know it's an act. Nobody really wants to kill the opposing side.
It happens a lot by me since I'm in a USA town that regularly holds a celebration of the British destruction of the place. The LARP types (reenactors) love it because the red-coats hardly ever get to be the guys that win. The blue guys fire back, but lose, but in reality there was no resistance. Everybody skedaddled and the place was burned down.
So the consciousness is a separate thing, not just a different process of the body that utilizes different noncomputational physics. If the latter were true, then the body would be liking the ice cream, just via a noncomputational mechanism.
Funny, but I totally agree with that wording.
Only because you choose not to consider them to be part of you, just like when you say "Also my body". That's a choice to include that.
I would say that a thing with no understanding of chess would not be able to win the game. Again, the different in our views seems to be a language one. Two systems (black boxes) are doing the same thing, but the word 'understands' only applies if it's done the magic way and not the computational way. I take a more pragmatic definition: If it wins or even plays a plausible game, the word 'understands' is functionally applicable.
It would probably slaughter any human at Jeopardy or some other typical trivial game. But I agree, the word 'understands' is pretty inapplicable to the LLM.
If you mean that a brain isn't implemented as a Turing machine, I agree, but neither is any computer anywhere. The circuits don't work that way.
Also, a brain is just part of a person-system just like a CPU is part of a self-driving car.. A person is conscious, not a brain,
A person is neither. It can in theory be simulated by either of those, but it wouldn't be done by modeling the person as either of those. A person is no more a Turing machine than is the weather. A digital computer is a Von Neumann machine, and a person isn't one of those either. There are digital circuits involved however. Wires, on/off states, etc. No clock. No bus. No instructions.
This is very different than simulation theory as I understand it. Sim theory doesn't say the simulator approximates our world. Sim theory says the simulator creates or instantiates our world. Exactly.
If the simulator is only approximating our world, then what is the real world?
Quoting noAxioms
Do you think (or does anyone think) the dots in Life have an interior monologue?
Quoting noAxioms
Bostrom asks, "Are you a COMPUTER simulation?" (my emphasis)
If he meant computer as understood by some future society but not by us, he would have said that. He didn't. Did he?
Quoting noAxioms
You agree with me on this point then, am I correct?
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. Can you remind me of what we're agreeing or disagreeing on then?
My only concerns with what you've said so far are:
1) That simulation theory claims the simulator approximates some deeper reality; and
2) That Ms. Pac-Man is an extension of my mind and can be said to have an inner life, namely mine.
Quoting noAxioms
You are misconstruing what Bostrom and other simulationists believe, then. They're not saying we're an approximation. They're saying our exact reality is being instantiated by a computer.
Quoting noAxioms
Right. That's what simulation is. Which is why simulation theory is the wrong word. It should be instantiation.
Quoting noAxioms
The fact that you can't explain why you have a mind is not evidence for a simulator. This point I don't follow.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. But why would they do that? We don't do ancestral simulations, though we have the computing power to make a first cut at such an enterprise.
Quoting noAxioms
Smoot believes we're a computer simulation. A depressing claim for such an accomplished scientist to believe.
What's wrong with Youtube? Sean Carrol is on there. Ed Witten gets interviewed there. The famous Sabine Hossenfelder. Many others. There's a guy named Eigenchris who does lectures on the math of general relativity. Youtube is a fantastic resource. A person does not suddenly become disreputable by virtue of being filmed.
Quoting noAxioms
Lack of detractors is not evidence for a theory.
Quoting noAxioms
I mentioned civil war reenactors because that's the only type of ancestor simulation we do. Why does Bostrom think our simulators would have an interest in ancestor simulation? More likely they'd be trying to crack this weekend's football games!
Quoting noAxioms
I take your point. My body processes the ice cream. Chemicals in my limbic system produce a feeling of enjoyment. My consciousness is the thing that has the experience, and science has absolutely no explanation for that.
Even if pleasure is a chemical response in the brain, my experience is the pleasure. The chemicals in the brain don't have experiences, I do.
Funny, but I totally agree with that wording.
Quoting noAxioms
My mind is my experience of my body.
Quoting noAxioms
My computer regularly beats me at chess, and it's just flipping bits as per its program. We'll have to agree to disagree if you believe otherwise.
It's no different than the moisture sensor in your clothes dryer. It does not "know" or "care" about your clothes, it's just a mechanical mechanism.
Quoting noAxioms
I take understanding to be a subjective mental mental state. We must agree to disagree on this. Do you think your dryer understands what it means for your clothes to be wet?
Quoting noAxioms
Wait, you just got through emphasizing that functional behavior is understanding. If an LLM passes the bar exam, by your definition it understands the law. But now you are going back on that.
Am I correct that you contradicted yourself?
Quoting noAxioms
A TM can emulate any physical computer in existence. It doesn't matter whether the circuits work that way. In theory, they could.
Quoting noAxioms
Brains are not conscious. Minds are. What the relation is, we don't know.
Quoting noAxioms
If you agree with me that a TM is not a person, why are we having this conversation? I have a feeling there's a simulationist out there laughing at this foolish conversation. What are we discussing?
Quoting noAxioms
A TM could emulate any physical computer in existence. In fact a TM could emulate any type of computation there is, according to the Church-Turing thesis.
An exact simulation of any GS world cannot be done by that GS.
My comment to which you replied talks about us being the GS, and when we run a simulation of this world it is always an approximation. My example was a VR one, but it goes for an actual sim as well.
If our world is a simulation, then it is either a total fiction created by some completely different (and more capable) GS world, or, per Bostrom, it is an approximation of the GS world. It cannot be exact for several reasons, another of which is that our world is not finite in extent.
Anyway, read Bostrom. The paper sets out details of where the simulation goes into greater detail (but still an approximation) and where it approximates to a greater degree.
The base simulator IS the real world, and it isn't approximating our world, it is approximating its own world according to Bostrom. I say 'base' because we might be 13 levels down or something, but it cannot be infinite regress.
Not me. There's probably somebody out there that does. It's like asking if electrons have an interior life. Wrong question.
I suspect he meant a computer as we know it today, but oodles smaller/faster, as if Moore's law can continue for many more centuries. The computers of today are pretty inconceivable to those that first made them, as are the applications to which they can be applied.
Being correct is not a function of finding one person that agrees with you on something. We could both be wrong.
Well for one, that mind is computational or not.
About point 1: It has been proven that a world like ours cannot simulate itself perfectly, so it has to be limited, an approximation at best.
About 2, the difference is pure language. You use words differently than do I. I see no fundamental differences between our views.
I don't see a different usage of the word, no. But again, this might just be a difference in language, how each of us uses the words in question.
Again, that cannot be. That's not possible. All of them have to be approximations.
Nonsense. Real things are simulated all the time, and all of them are approximations.
Correct. It needs to be close enough to achieve the goal of the simulation, but it doesn't need to be closer than that.
He goes into some detail about what parts are more heavily approximated and which are done to greater detail.
Indeed, why? I see no reason to do it, even if we had this unimaginable capability.
Agree. I said I didn't get my physics from videos. I didn't say that anybody that appears in a video is disreputable.
I did take apart a Sabine video, showing it to be flat out wrong. It shows that the videos are not peer reviewed, and a good physics source is. This doesn't make Sabine disreputable. It means mistakes remain where peer review is absent.
You have no more explanation than science does. Just saying that your comment, true or false, isn't evidence one way or the other.
Fair enough. I hold the bar higher for LLM because you can ask it to write a program to do a small thing, and it does, but it fails for something more involved, any task that requires more understanding of a deeper problem. This is why no LLM is replacing human programmers at corporations (yet), even if they very much are writing papers for students.
Bottom line is, the LLM algorithm isn't "understand, then write about that understanding", it is more "write something likely to be a plausible reply", a reworded plagiarism of pre-existing content.
Because asserting that a TM is or is not a person is very different than asserting that a TM and a human are or are not capable of simulating each other.
I've seen that used as an argument against simulation theory. That it takes energy to simulate each level, and there wouldn't be enough energy several levels down to create a realistic simulation. But that assumes that the upstairs physics is like ours. But that's false. Ms. Pac-Man, should she be sentient, would be wrong to assume that our physics is like hers.
Quoting keystone
I might give it another run one of these days. So much to read, so little time, so many Youtube videos ...
Quoting keystone
It can't be simulating itself, you just agreed with that.
Quoting keystone
Sometimes I think pansychism is the only way out.
Bostrom asks, "Are you a COMPUTER simulation?" (my emphasis)
Quoting keystone
Faster does not help when it comes to computation. I thought we'd agreed on that. A supercomputer can execute Euclid's greatest common divisor algorithm faster than I can with pencil and paper; but in principle there is nothing it can do that I can't.
If consciousness involves a TM "going faster," then whatever it is doing to instantiate consciousness can not be computational. Literally by the definition of computation.
Is that clear? I thought we were agreed on the definition. Going faster can never let you compute more things than you could with pencil and paper. If going faster makes a difference, then the difference is not computational. It's something else.
If a TM can be conscious by going fast, but not by going slow then consciousness by definition is not a computable function. Going fast can bump you into a more favorable complexity class; but it's can't change the status of computability.
Quoting keystone
I think I meant, was I correct that we are in agreement. Even if both wrong.
Quoting keystone
I'm with the nots.
Quoting keystone
This was about whether my mind somehow extends to Ms. Pac-Man's. I think it's an important point, not just semantics.
Quoting keystone
It's a thousand percent different. It's apples and rutabagas. A simulation of gravity is the execution of an approximate mathematical model.
The GS's simulation of us is exact. We ARE the simulation. This seems to be a real point of difference, not just semantics.
Quoting keystone
If we are only being approximated by the simulator, what is being approximated?
Quoting keystone
That's exactly why I say the simulator instantiates us, it does not simulate us. Because simulation means something else, and perhaps Bostrom has poisoned these waters forever.
Quoting keystone
Then what is the thing being simulated? You mean there's a real me, and the me that I experience is only an approximation to it? I don't think I agree with any of this.
Quoting keystone
Ok I'll have to either read the paper or put a sock in it. The latter takes far less effort and is my likely path here. If Bostrom has already addressed my concerns then I should go read the paper.
Quoting keystone
Right. Why would anyone run an ancestor simulation? We don't, why should our future selves?
Quoting keystone
Good point.
Quoting keystone
The closer she stays to the stuff she knows, the better she is. She likes to extrapolate into subjects she knows nothing about, and then she's often wrong. I've learned a lot about MOND and dark matter from her.
Quoting keystone
I'm not claiming to have an explanation. Just that some of the cogsci folks are out over their skis these days.
Quoting keystone
I have just been made aware, via @flannel jesus, that an LLM has learned to play chess by training on nothing more than the records of games in standard chess notation. By doing nothing more than auto-completing these games as text strings, it can play passable chess. So I have had to seriously back off my own criticisms of LLMs along those lines. Anything that can be notated is fair game for an LLM. I've realized that humanity is doomed and I'm now ready to now bow down to my silicon overlords.
Quoting keystone
This was my exact position 24 hours ago. Now that I know that an LLM can play chess, I am not so sure. They were able to show that the chess LLM forms a mental picture of the position on the board, even though it was not programmed with any such categories of knowledge. It's really quite startling, at least to me. As close to the "emergence" that I've long argued against, as I've seen yet.
Quoting keystone
I can simulate a TM with pencil and paper. A TM can emulate a person, as via a chatbot. A TM can not instantiate consciousness or self-awareness. So I have been arguing, and so I believe. Hence, there ain't no simulator. There might be a God, because God is the simulator without the requirement of being a computation. That's why I say God is more likely than the simulation argument. One less assumption.
For full clarity, and I'm probably being unnecessarily pedantic here, it's not necessarily fair to say that's all they did. That's all their goal was, that's all they were asked to - BUT what all of this should tell you, in my opinion, is that when a neural net is asked to achieve a task, there's no telling HOW it's actually going to achieve that task.
In order to achieve the task of auto completing the chess text strings, it seemingly did something extra - it built an internal model of a board game which it (apparently) reverse engineered from the strings. (I actually think that's more interesting than its relatively high chess rating, the fact that it can reverse engineer the rules of chess seeing nothing but chess notation).
So we have to distinguish, I think, between the goals it was given, and how it accomplished those goals.
Apologies if I'm just repeating the obvious.
Quoting fishfryI said it couldn't simulate itself exactly. I didn't say it couldn't simulate itself.
It is necessary for a VR, but not a simulation, all of which is pointed out in my topic. It's why a sim can be done with pencil/paper and a VR cannot. Still, Bostrom needs a fast computer because a simulation with paper and such would have humanity go extinct before a fraction of a second was simulated. Bostrom is not making an 'in principle' argument.
True only in principle. In reality, each number written on a paper will likely rot away before it is needed for the next step. The guy with the pencil will die, as will all of humanity. So will the superfast computer (it cannot run forever in practice), but it will have gotten a lot further than the pencil team, and a lot further than any TM, however pimped out you make it.
That's a different kind of computability: the ability to get it done before the demise of the thing doing the computing.
I agree with all your points on the definition of computability, but I wasn't talking about that.
OK. I seem to be blowing it off to semantics, and I made MsPM an extension of me, not an extension of my mind. I consider myself to be conscious, not just a body that contains something that is.
Bostrom's view is that a sim of a person is also the execution of an approximate mathematical model. That this conflicts with your opinion means that your opinion is incompatible with what Bostrom hypothesizes.
If you mean that the thing simualted (us) is exactly the same as us, that is tautologically true, yes. But I'm saying that the simulated 'us' cannot be an exact simulation of a person in the GS world.
Yet again, the thing being simulated is 'ancestral history', whatever that means.
Bostrom does not suggest that there is or ever was a real fishfry in the GS world. You are part of the simulation, and that's it. The history being simulated is quite different than the one that actually happened way in the past history of the GS world, although the initial state of the simulation presumably had similarities to some actual past state of the GS history. Bostrom gives no indication of when this initial state was likely placed. Last Tuesday? A minute ago? 50000 years ago when humanity just started looking like us?
Again, tautologically true. But our reality is the causal result of an approximation of some past GS state.
Apparently 'because they can' and we don't because we can't. But visionaries have always had a lot of trouble guessing what purposes would be served by future high computing capacity. Anyway, I don't buy that reasoning because it's only there because the hypothesis needs it to hold any water.
And she exquisitely tore apart a lot of the woo surrounding the delayed choice quantum eraser since that experiment is so often billed as an example of reverse causality. The one I tore apart had to do with general relativity, which I don't even know that well, but I know enough to show the assertions in the video to be bunk.
That works great for opening, perhaps for 20 moves even. But eventually it has to get to a position that it hasn't seen in its training data, and then what? It can't just auto-complete with more text, since the text given would likely not be a legal move. So I'd like to see an article about how it proceeds from a middle-game. Turns out that the LLM is often more capable than I give it credit for. Scary.
And then it continues to make (usually) legal moves which are approximately as good as its general skill level predicts they should be.
https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2024/01/03/chess-world-models.html
I'm unsure that's true. The fine-grained nature of the world we live it might just be a function of adaptive creative algorithms which feed off of past events, in the simulation. This would also explain the wildly increasing complexity across time.
I guess that's so. But that would mean that the simulation is a reality of its own, independently of the "real" reality. (As a story has its own logic, even though it is just a story) Still, the algorithms are part of reality - they are not simulated, are they? - they wouldn't really be algorithms if they were simulated. So the simulaton may be different from the real world in all sorts of ways, but it needs to be built from and in the real world.
Well yes, by my definitions "couldn't simulate exactly" is synonymous with couldn't simulate.
Again, we have this ongoing equivocation of the word simulation. I agree with you that when I program my computer to simulate gravity or the weather, the simulation is not exact. It's an approximation.
But when the GS simulates my consciousness and the experience of my senses, that is exact. There is no other thing "being" simulated. The simulation is the only version of reality.
But you claim Bostrom has already considered that point, and I am not in a position to disagree. So I could be wrong.
Quoting noAxioms
Then whatever it's doing is not computational. If you execute Euclid's algorithm faster, it is still Euclid's algorithm and has no capabilities (other than working faster) than it did before. It does not acquire more side effects or epiphenomena or "emergences" like consciousness or realism.
This point is essential. And it's not deep. It's just a restatement of the definition of computability, as opposed to complexity, where execution speed matters a lot.
Quoting noAxioms
If that is true, then VR is not computational. Because -- by the definition of computability -- speed doesn't matter. If a supercomputer computes Euclid's algorithm, and when you run the same code using pencil and paper it doesn't compute Euclid's algorithm, then the supercomputer did not compute Euclid's algorithm.
This is so fundamental to computing that it must be agreed to. If running an algorithm fast does something that running the same algorithm slowly doesn't do, then whatever it's doing is not computational. Else it could do the same computation slowly. That's the definition.
Jumping into a faster complexity class does not let you compute more things than you could before.
Quoting noAxioms
What does running an algorithm fast do that running the same algorithm slowly doesn't? You need to explain this clearly please so that I can understand.
Quoting noAxioms
True by the very definition of computation.
Quoting noAxioms
Even if I agree 100%, the definition of computability specifically ignores matters of time, space, energy, and resources.
Quoting noAxioms
No. It's not. It's still computability. It's a different complexity class at best. Those are the definitions. I did not make them up. A function is computable if there's a TM that computes it. Time doesn't matter.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok you agree. That's good. So if I write some code, and when I run it slowly it computes Euclid's algorithm; and when I run it fast, it computes Euclid's algorithm and whistles Dixie; then by the definition of computability, which you have now agreed to, whistling Dixie is not a computable function. It it were, the slow algorithm would get the same output as the fast one.
That's the only point I'm making. But it's important, because you claim that running the algorithm fast makes a qualitative difference. And I am pointing out that the difference, whatever it is, can not be a computation alone. It's doing something extra.
[I correct myself to clarify that I'm not saying it's not doing a computation; rather, it's not doing ONLY a computation. It must be doing something else, if it has an extra output when it runs fast].
Quoting noAxioms
Yes you are, MsPM isn't. And it's not just semantics. Ms. PM does not inherit your humanity, sentience, qualia, or experiences.
Quoting noAxioms
Wait. There's an abstract mathematical model of a human and any particular sim is only an approximate instance? Is that what you are saying Bostrom is saying? That's more like Tegmark, that we're all mathematical structures.
Quoting noAxioms
So there's a simulation of a person AND there's a real person being simulated? Now you have TWO mysteries instead of one. I'm a simulation and there's a real me above that? I don't believe that.
Quoting noAxioms
I'm afraid I am not able to process this. Every simulation entity S has a "real" counterpart S' that's the thing being simulated? This is not a coherent ontology.
Quoting noAxioms
You have just finished telling me that I am a simulation. For sake of discussion I accept that.
Then you tell me that I'm only an approximation of a real person.
And NOW you tell me that there is no real person.
I don't follow your chain of exposition here.
Quoting noAxioms
I'll stop responding point by point here because I no longer accept the coherence of the thesis being proposed. I'm a sim fishfry and there's a "real" entity fishfry who's being simulated, but who isn't reall there. My parser has stopped here, I need context and explanation before I can go on.
Quoting noAxioms
Ditto, will defer comment. My brain threw a "Makes No Sense" exception.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. This was about ancestor simulation. I've always thought that was a weak part of the argument. What we do is invent video games that use different physics and are nothing like us at all. We don't run ancestor simulations. "Ok I'll be James Madison and you be Dolly."
Quoting noAxioms
I've seen videos where someone debunks every other relativity video on the Internet, from the Science Asylum to the annoying (my personal opinion) British PBS guy, to the guy from Fermilab, Don Lincoln, and a few others. I don't know enough physics to disagree with any of them.
Quoting noAxioms
That's the astonishing thing. It plays pretty well even then, in games whose length exceeds the length of any of its training data. That was the scary and surprising part.
Quoting noAxioms
I think the article in @flannel jesus's article(s) go over some of that, I haven't read it all yet.
I want to agree and disagree with this. By most definitions of 'reality', yes, a simulated world would be a reality of its own, but it being called a simulation is an explicit admission of it being dependent on the deeper reality running the simulation, just like saying 'God created the universe' makes the explicit relation of the universe being dependent on the god. Neither case is that of a 'universe on its own'.
Quoting fishfryThe above two comments seem to contradict each other. By your definition, a simulation isn't one unless it is exact, and then you give examples of simulations that are not exact.
You also said that consciousness is not computational, and therefore the GS cannot simulate via computation, a conscious thing. That puts you into a position to not dictate whether or not those holding a different opinion would say that exactness is required or not.
So pacman does not involve computation. Hmm....
Agree, but I was talking about VR when I said that the rate of computation is essential. None of your examples above are VR examples.
Other examples is any other kind of real-time programming such as a self driving car. A car cannot function if its processing uses paper and pencil. A certain minimal rate of computation is required, or the task cannot be done. Computing slowly isn't enough if you take 3 months to see the stop sign. You seem to assert that what a self-driving car does therefore cannot be computation, but it very much is.
I already told you: It gets it done before the computer ceases computing. A human with a pencil lives maybe 50 years (with the pencil) and accomplishes what a computer can do in under a second, and computers tend to last longer than a second before they fail. A computer can come up with an answer while the answer is still needed. In a simulation, there are no deadlines to meet (except getting something done before the computer fails), but in any kind of real-time programming, it must be completed before the output is needed by the consumer of that output.
If it whistles Dixie, it is computing something different. Both should have identical output. Euclid's algorithm isn't a real-time task.
Only to a real-time task, and none of your examples are one.
.
There's a model of physics, and any sim is only a computable approximation of that. Bostrom says that a human is a product of physics, and thus can be functionally simulated given a sufficient level of detail, which is still classical.
Same model, different supervenience, if I get my terminology straight.
I don't know what you think it means for a real person to be simulated. Bostrom suggests a sim of ancestral history, which means that random new people get born, and these people do not in any way correspond to actual people that might have existed in the history of the GS. Much depends on what period of history they choose for their initial state.
That would be something other than 'ancestral history'. You say take a molecular scan of a real person, create a sim model of that exact arrangement of matter, put it in a small environment, and see what it does. That's far more likely than this 'ancestral' thing, but it also would be trivial for the simulated person to realize he's not the original since he's been put in this tiny bounded space, a sort of jail, when he remembers getting into the scanning machine.
Now according to your stated beliefs, that simulation wouldn't work. It is computational and you say a person isn't, so the simulated thing would not be functional at any level of detail.
No, I did not suggest there needs to be a 2nd fishfry that is 'real'. Ancestral history simulations certainly don't produce simulated people that correspond to people in the GS world.
No, not two of you. Bostrom's sim hypothesis would have all of us being in one large simulation, and no real fishfry in the GS world. I apologize if something I posted led you to conclude that I was suggesting otherwise.
What is approximated is the physics. I can simulate planetary motion by modeling Earth as a point mass. That's a super-trivial approximation of Earth that works for seeing where it is 100 years from now, but it needs more detail if you say want to see which way the planet is facing in 100 years.
Yes, but over time, many video games keep getting closer and closer to the sort of reality we'
re used to. Not all of them. Some are still total fiction with deliberate fiction physics, if they have physics at all. They're also video games, which makes them VR, not simulations.
It's low hanging fruit to debunk various videos. There is indeed whole sites dedicated to debunking relativity in all possible ways, and it is a interesting exercise to find the fallacious reasoning in every one of the arguments. And I do know enough physics to do it to almost all of them.
The delayed choice quantum eraser isn't really an experiment having anything to do with relativity theory.
News to me as well. It seems to require at least some level of what would qualify as 'understanding'.
The meaning of "dependent" is context-dependent. The dependence of a simulation on its deeper reality is quite different from the dependence of a created object on it creator. If one thinks of some entity having created a universe, the implication is that the creation exists in its own right. Insofar as a simulation is a reality of its own in the way that a story is a reality of its own, it will not exist in its own right and remains under the control of the story-teller, even though it may have an internal logic that is not the same as the logic of reality.
Quoting fishfry
..... unless you think of fishfry as an avatar. On the other hand, if I am a simulation that is not aware of the fact, I must be able to act and react in my world. In that case, I am not a simulation of anything.
Quoting noAxioms
I can think of models of the weather system that are used to predict the weather. They can be called simulations. They remain quite distinct from the actual weather. There are neither storms, nor rain, nor sunshine inside the computer. Yet the point of the exercise is that it remain as close as possible to what actually happens/-ed. (I can't imagine what the point of ancestral simulations would be, if not that.)
Once you suppose that the simulations are conscious (perhaps per impossibile), those people are not simulations. They might be clones (even if they are not clones in the classical sense). But they would be actual people, perfectly capable of behaving differently from their "originals".
Quoting noAxioms
The point of the simulations would be lost if real people capable in their own right of acting and reacting in their world. It wouldn't even be a way of running an alternative history. Or is there some other point at stake here, that I've failed to grasp?
I think is entirely dependent on S's use of the word 'reality'. The way i use, it is expressly apt to delineate between a simulated, and a non-simulated 'reality'. The former would not actually be able to come undert this label. I think the term is complete incoherent if it isn't doing this job. I realise others use it differently.
Quoting Ludwig V
I think algorithms are simulations of behavioural matrices. I can't understand the above claim, really.
Quoting Ludwig V
Which is why the previous two claims seem fishy to me. It is patently obvious they are not analogous or parallel scenarios to be in, for any given S.
That's disingenuous. A simulation of the world, as in simulation theory, must be exact.
A simulation of gravity is necessarily an approximation.
That's because the two usages of simulation are being equivocated. Which is why I say Bostrom-like simulation should be called instantiation.
It's not me using the same word two different ways. It's me trying to EXPLAIN that OTHER people are using the same word for two very different things. Leading directly to so much confusion around the subject.
Quoting noAxioms
Correct. I say that under the hypothesis that we are a simulation, the simulation -- more properly called an instantiation -- is exact.
But I also maintain that the hypothesis is false. So there's no contradiction.
If 2 + 2 = 5 than I am the Pope. The implication is true, and the premise is false. That's exactly what I said.
Quoting noAxioms
So I am not in a position to dictated whether or not 2 + 2 = 5 because I hold that the proposition is false? You are not making sense.
Quoting noAxioms
ANY phenomenon whatsoever that depends on execution speed is not (only) computational. That's not me saying that, and it is not a deep or clever point. It's merely the definition of computation.
Quoting noAxioms
That shows that complexity theory is important in self-driving cars, not just computability theory.
You have already agreed with me on these definitions many posts ago, so I don't understand why you're pretending not to remember agreeing with me.
Quoting noAxioms
Agreed. Which does not alter the definition of computation, a point you have already agreed to.
Quoting noAxioms
You are arguing about a point you have long since already agreed with. Go take it up with the computer scientists. These are their definitions, not mine.
I take your point about real time computing, but that does not change the definition of computability.
Quoting noAxioms
I take your point about real time computation, but it doesn't change the definition of computation. I'm not aware of how computer scientists patch that little issue but I'll concede it for the moment.
Quoting noAxioms
So who is the me that's being simulated? I'd like to meet him. Is that what "Prepare to meet your maker" means? Then I'm not in a hurry to meet him, so nevermind.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok that was about the overlap between Tegmark and Bostrom. Trolling squared.
Quoting noAxioms
You (or you quoting Bostrom) say that I'm a simulation, meaning that I'm an approximation of something. I'm asking what I'm an approximation of.
Quoting noAxioms
So do I correspond to an actual person or not? As I go through my daily life and encounter other humanoid-appearing creatures, is there a way for me to determine which correspond to actual people and which don't? Are the non-corresponding creatures like NPCs in video games?
You know you are really out on a limb here, are you sure you want to be defending this theory of corresponding and non-corresponding people?
Quoting noAxioms
Farther out on the same limb. You're making a point not worth defending. I don't happen to remember being put in the scanning machine, but only because my vat programmers have erased my memory. Other than that, I'm trapped on this planet. I can't fly like the birds, I can't swim like the fish, I can't live forever, and I have to wait in line at the DMV just to be allowed to drive my car. Sounds like a tiny bounded space to me.
Quoting noAxioms
Not my stated beliefs. A premise that I reject, but can nonetheless explore the consequences of. I reject that 2 + 2 = 5, but I can still assert that if 2 + 2 = 5 then I am the Pope.
Quoting noAxioms
So we're all non-corresponding players now? Not just some of us?
Quoting noAxioms
You said the simulations are an approximation. I asked the perfectly obvious question, an approximation of what? And your answer is corresponding and non-corresponding entities. No answer at all since it raises even more questions. Like whether my next door neighbor is one of those non-corresponders, in which case I should report him at once.
Quoting noAxioms
Simulation as approximation. As opposed to simulation as instantiation. A crucial semantic error Bostrom made that has led to the exact confusion you have here. He should have long ago corrected himself. If he had called it "computational instantiation theory" it would be much more clear that all he means is God as a Turing machine.
Quoting noAxioms
VR? You mean Ms. Pac-Man experiences her reality but we know it's only an illusion?
Honestly I think you have gotten yourself tangled up trying to defend the indefensible.
Quoting noAxioms
Not what I said. Not debunking relativity. Debunking explanations of relativity by all the popular Youtube physicists. Not the same thing at all.
Quoting noAxioms
Makes my eyes glaze, can't hold up my end of that convo.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, the chess-playing LLM is a startling datapoint.
On the other hand, the new Google AI search says to put glue on pizza in case your cheese doesn't stick. So there's still hope for us humans. @flannel jesus
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ai-glue-pizza-i-tried-it-2024-5
I am not an avatar in a video game, for the usual Cartesian reason. There's a "me" in here having subjective experiences.
This ignores the possibility that there may not be "lots of civilizations". In other words, the three alternatives present no cogent assessment of likelihood.
Quoting Patterner
Do you think avatars in video games can believe anything?
But there very much is storms and rain in the world simulated. It wouldn't be a weather simulation without such things.
Similarly, a simulation of a conscious being would not make a computer conscious, but that doesn't mean that simulated person is not conscious. Bostrom suggests that is exactly what's going on.
I suppose that's the point, but Bostrom has zero awareness of chaos theory if he thinks that will happen. And he doesn't suggest it. He makes no suggestion that us (the simulation) is evolving in any way the same history as in the simulating world. But yes, what's the point of running such a simulation? Not for prediction purposes, and that's almost always the motivation behind running any simulation.
I don't think anybody is supposing that. See the above. Yes, a simulated person would behave differently than 'their originals', which I put in quotes because there are no originals in the scenario in question, except as a wild guess at an initial state, giving some characters the same names and roles as historic figures.
That sentence lacks a verb, and you lost me. Real people are the ones supposedly running the simulation. The 'point of the simulation' is meaningful to those that are running it. The simulated people have no access to those running the sim, and if they detect or just suspect that they are a sim, they can only guess at the motivations behind the running of it.
Your wording in the verb-less sentence suggests that simulated people would perhaps need to exert some sort of free will over the physics of the simulation. That model isn't compatible with Bostrom's view.
Quoting fishfryOr its the other people always meaning the same thing, and thus needing only one word for it.
You seem to be the one finding two different meanings, one which sounds like how others use 'simulation', and then this other thing which for reasons not spelled out, require exactness, and is perhaps not computational. I have no idea how to simulate something non-computational, let alone doing it exactly. I don't think anybody else is suggesting any such thing.
Well yea, you deny the premise that physics is computational at the necessary levels of precision needed.
No, you're not in the position to say what other people think follows from accepting that 2+2=5.
You said "Then whatever [VR] is doing is not computational.", and now you say it is nothing but.
Perhaps you don't consider pacman to be an example of VR. It's admittedly crude and not deeply emersive, but most action video games are nevertheless a form of VR.
The point seems moot. The subject of the topic is simulation theory, not VR theory. VR examples have little to no bearing on simulation hypothesis, a hypothesis you just plain deny due to your lack of belief that a human is computational.
I don't think I ever said that. This quote is mistakenly attributed to me. Maybe I'm wrong about that. It's a long thread.
You seem to go on endlessly about me somehow disagreeing with the definition of computability. I'm not. Real-time issues don't exist in simulation hypothesis, so those are moot until one starts talking about something other than SH.
Under the simulation hypothesis, you are yourself, which is tautologically true, SH or not. There is not a different 'more real' or 'less real' fishfry somewhere else. It is an ancestor simulation, not a simulation of a fishfry model. Your maker is still your mother, also part of the simulation.
You are part of one large simulation, and yes, me quoting Bostrom. I don't buy the hypothesis for a moment.
You are not an approximation of anything. The simulation is an approximation of the physics of a system (a planet perhaps). You are part of the state of that simulation.
Probably not, unless the simulation's initial state was very recent (our time) and that initial state included a real person who happened to identify as fishfry. I seriously doubt the GS people centuries in the future would know almost anything about you except your parental lineage, all of which is only relevant if the initial state was set since your birth. It has to start somewhere, and that means that the people of that time are created in thin air, with memories totally consistent with their nonexistent past. Doing that requires a full knowledge of how memory and consciousness works, not just a model of how physics works. The initial state requires far more work than does the simulation itself, which is fairly trivial if you get the state right.
Such things are easy with weather and car crashes, but a nightmare for something complex.
Probably none of them, unless they are older than the date of the initial state. Anybody conceived after simulation start has zero probability of having a corresponding real person.
No. They're no different, except they have real memories, not fake ones put there by the initial state. Maybe the sim only last 10 minutes and everybody is 'corresponding'. This is presuming that the people of the future know exactly who and where everybody is at some random time centuries prior. They don't.
Why do you harp on this? Of what possible importance would it be to anybody in a sim to have a corresponding person (long dead) in the GS? I do realize that I am asking this question of a person who thinks people are special in the universe can cannot be computational like everything else.
Bostrom is maybe. You forget who's pushing the hypothesis. It isn't me, but I'm a computer person and at least I understand it enough to see it for the nonsense it is.
SH is not a BiV scenario. VR is, but Bostrom is not talking VR.
An corresponding people from the initial state of the sim would correspond to people centuries dead in the GS world, so nobody can correspond to any living 'real' person.
Sorry, but despite your repeated use of that word, I don't know what you mean by it. You've mentioned that it needs to be 'exact', and the exact physics of even a small trivial real system cannot be exactly simulated, so there cannot be what you call an instantiation. So we're back only to simulations of the approximate physics of some chosen system.
Quoting JanusBostrom addresses that point in his first of three possibilities listed in his abstract.
Quoting Patterner
I occasionally get a reply that doesn't make it to the 'mentions' list. Maybe a glitch. I suspect it perhaps might be a post that was already posted, and then later gets edited to mention you, but the one in question here is short and a reply only to you, so that's a significant data point against my theory.
Oh, I don't think it's as bad as that.
Quoting noAxioms
No, there are only simulated storms and rain in the simulated world.
Quoting noAxioms
I'm sorry. I'm afraid I can't re-construct what that sentence was supposed to be. But your version of it is what I was trying to say. I can believe that it is not compatible with Bostrom's view. The question is whether Bostrom's view is coherent.
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
So Bostrom does suggest that the simulations of people "inside" the (non-conscious) computer are conscious.
Quoting fishfry
I'm agree with fishfry here, but adding that if the "me" in here is having subjective experience, then I must be able to interact with the presented illusory environment, that is, I can cause things to happen in the environment and get appropriate feed-back from the environment. But that would make me a real person, not a simulation (though I might be a clone.)
Quoting noAxioms
There's an ambiguity here. There could be simulations of people that are like fictional people. Their originals would be people in general, not people in particular (though an ancestral simulation suggests that they would need to be people in particular - if they aren't, then what makes it an "ancestral" simulation.)
This in in fact an argument against simulation theory...
Which is that simulation theory implies some computing power (as we understand computing and computers)
But problem is that in real world there is biology and biological things happening such as us, plants and animals, this is something which "computers" (electronic devices) don't do and therefore it's an argument why we don't live in a computer simulation.
--
Sorry if somebody already told this, I didn't read entire thread.
Sure, they are simulated storms in the GS (fishfry's term, which I find very useful) world since that's the world in which the simulation is running, but in our world, they are storms. In the case of a weather simulation, in the simulated world, they are storms, but in that case, the GS world is ours, so they are simulated storms relative to us. There are no people in our weather simulations to call them storms, but the point stands: What they're called depends on the point of view.
Bostrom proposal is consistent with the methodological naturalism under which all of modern science is based. That means that human beings are treated as just collections of matter doing what the laws of physics says that matter does. I say consistent, but then Bostrom changes the laws of physics from here to there, as does any simulation. A simulation has boundaries, and so a distant star is probably modeled (most of the time) as a simple point source of light. The people in the sim would probably notice if there were no stars in the sky but the simulation hardware is not capable of simulating stellar combustion at the molecular level for the entire visible universe.
He proposes that we are likely in such a simulation. If you consider yourself to be conscious, then yes, the hypothesis says that you (a simulated thing) is conscious. That's different than saying that the simulation itself is conscious. The simulation and you are different things. The former is a process running in some GS world, and the latter is you, an simulated dynamic arrangement of matter in the simulated world.
His argument proceeds along probability lines, not along empirical evidence lines. This is very similar to the sort of probabilistic reasoning behind the dangers of Boltzmann Brains. No argument for or against Boltzmann Brains can proceed along empirical lines so one is left with probability.
Of course you interact with your environment. what kind of simulation would it be if you couldn't? Even a statue of Ludwig interacts with its environment, if only to get wet, change temperature, and exert force on the ground. Having subjective experience or not doesn't change that, but you'd probably die pretty quickly if you didn't have that subjective experience.
You are a real person in this world, but a simulated person relative to the GS world (according to Bostrom). I am perhaps using a different definition of 'real' than you are, and this likely needs to be clarified. I consider what we can see, reach out and touch, to be real to us. You seem to be using a different definition, such as perhaps "is part of the GS", the base world. which presumes no infinite regress.
Totally agree. There would be no particular correspondence between people or events in the sim, to people and events in (the past history of) the GS. A war in this world, or a cup being dropped and breaking, would have no particular corresponding event in the GS world. And you're exactly correct: Without this correspondence, how is it being described as an ancestral simulation justified in any way?
Quoting SpaceDweller
Bostrom's hypothesis is consistent with the methodological naturalism under which all of science operates. That means that plants/animals are very much something that computers can 'do'.
I have read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
But this is just a hypothesis based on "Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct."
But computers as we understand them now don't qualify for simulation of biological phenomenon.
Forgive me - what the "GS"?
It means 'Great Simulator', which is the base reality running the base simulation. So if we're 3 levels down, the GS is the first level, the only level that isn't itself a simulation.
The term was coined by fishfry in this topic many posts back, and it's easy to type.
Quoting SpaceDweller
I beg to differ. Computers as we understand them now are quite capable of the task, but at this time, perhaps 40 orders of magnitude speed and memory capacity short of the scale of simulation described by Bostrom. This presumes naturalism of course, and many here (fishfry, possibly Ludwig, possibly yourself) do not so presume.
My point is that Bostrom and others are equivocating simulation in this manner, and this clouds their thinking and confuses everyone else. so yes, I am the one finding two different meanings. I might be wrong, but we are 100% agreed that "I am the one finding two different meanings." I not only conceded that, I insist on it. It's my thesis. Glad we're agreed.
I am allowed to have an opinion, right? I've already admitted I haven't read the paper so I could be wrong. But I do have my opinion, and you seem to understand my opinion perfectly well. In which case I'm happy. I don't require agreement. And you have motivated me a bit to go read it, though I do have other priorities and might not get to it. In which case I'll remain both ignorant and wrong. But at least I'll have my opinion :-)
BTW we do simulate noncomputational things all the time. That's why there's computation! We don't know the exact rules by which the economy works, but we run economic simulation of models of the economy all the time.
Quoting noAxioms
Oh no that's not true. I deny that physics is computational, or rather I'm pretty sure it's not.
But I am certain that we simulate, approximate, and model physics extremely well. What's the famous factoid, that quantum chromodynamics predicts the magnetic moment of the electron to 13 decimal places or some such. I certainly respect and enjoy such brilliant approximating. But what the hell's an electron, and more importantly why, nobody quite knows. We're approximating. Simulating. Modeling. We are not engaging with the thing itself.
Whereas (this is my thesis and maybe not Bostrom's) simulation theory says that our very existence, as it really is, is a program in the big computer in the sky. An entirely different thing than simulation.
Quoting noAxioms
Oh my, are we disagreeing on propositional logic? I thought that everyone (when playing the game of rationality and logic) agrees that IF 2 +2 = 5 THEN I am the Pope. One need not believe either clause to recognize the truth of the proposition.
Truly not following you since I'm sure you agree with me about this. I mean, we all do believe in material implication, don't we?
Quoting noAxioms
I'll stipulate that if I had enough quarters and enough beer I might find my experience of the game so immersive that it's practically VR. From PacMan to the new Apple headset's not that far a leap, the underlying tech is the same. So I'll call PacMan early VR, I have no problem with that.
I think the point was about execution speed. Self-driving cars and realtime systems in general are doing something that's not just computation, since execution speed is a factor. I assume computer scientists must have a technical term for that, when execution speed makes a difference in the output of a computation. It's just a semantic point, not too important I think.
Quoting noAxioms
I have opinions, I have beliefs, I don't deny them. I really doubt humans are computational in the sense of our present understanding of computation. We have some extra secret sauce, I don't know what it is.
Quoting noAxioms
I'll agree with you there, and the forum software confuses me sometimes.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. Apologies for going on endlessly. I could end this. We're past the point of whatever we were talking about originally. The best thing for me to do would be to go read the Bostrom paper or remain silent, as Wittgenstein suggests.
Quoting noAxioms
A system can't simulate itself, except trivially in the sense that an apple is a perfect simulation of an apple. If a thing simulated itself the simulation would have to contain a copy of the simulation and ad infinitum.
Quoting noAxioms
But then was is my Cartesian "I", the thing that doubts, the thing that is deceived? Is that not being simulated too? What are these thoughts and experiences I spend so much of my life having?
Quoting noAxioms
But you'll defend it to the death against the likes of me, who hasn't even read the paper? Honestly I'm not worth the effort :-)
I understand that you're trying to just explain to me what Bostrom says, but my problem is that I have certain preconceptions about what he says, and I believe them pretty strongly. That's because even though I haven't read Bostrom, I've read a bit of simulation criticism and support. So I've formed a worldview about it.
Quoting noAxioms
Is my consciousness part of the simulation? Is that the distinction between VR and Sim?
Quoting noAxioms
So maybe or maybe not?
Quoting noAxioms
Full knowledge of how memory and consciousness works. So Bostrom is assuming this problem has been solved? But that goes against the claim that "the video games are so much better now," an argument often given in support of the simulation hypothesis.
Quoting noAxioms
So I'm not real, according to the theory. Why is simulation theory better than brain in a vat theory or Boltzmann brain theory?
Quoting noAxioms
Even if they did, they would not know what each person is going to do next. Unless you also reject free will.
Quoting noAxioms
If I'm a simulation, what am I a simulation of?
If I'm a simulation of something, what is that something? If I'm not a simulation of anything, then by definition I'm not a simulation. I'm an instantiation. This is the semantic point I'm insisting on, rightly or wrongly.
Quoting noAxioms
Well it's plainly false that "everything else" is computational. For example an oracle for the Halting problem is not computational, yet it's a standard device in computer science theory. So that's one thing that's not computational. There are many others. Chaitin's Omega is not computable but we can define it. For all you know, the world is not computational. For all I know, it is. But You are wrong to say that "everything else" is computational when I know at least two things that aren't. Maybe there are others. Like minds.
You can't go from "people aren't special in the universe," to "therefore people are computational." There's no link between those two things.
Quoting noAxioms
You are strenuously trying to explain to me that Bostrom's idea is nonsense; but not liking my own argument as to why it's nonsense. Why are we doing this?
Quoting noAxioms
SH is not brain in vat? Now I'm confused again. I thought VR was like a video game, and SH is where my mind is being instantiated too.
Quoting noAxioms
So now I'm a simulation of a dead person. You know you keep changing your explanation of this point. I think you should consider retracting it entirely, and trying to understand why I am so insistent on my claim that the word simulation is being used wrongly here.
Quoting noAxioms
I've explained it as well as I can.
Quoting noAxioms
There cannot be instantiation? What do you think the universe is? We've all been instantiated somehow. We are here. We have been instantiated. That's the point.
tl;dr: Well ... I'm pretty clear in my own mind what I mean, but if you say I'm misunderstanding Bostrom, I can't disagree, since I haven't read the paper. But I really think I'm right and everyone else is confused on this point. So if you simply want to make the point that I have an opinion and that I'm wrong. I agree. I have my opinion and I may be wrong, but the more we talk about it, the more these concepts are clear in my mind, and I think I'm right.
God instantiated the universe. You say God is a digital computer. I say that's one extra assumption and by Occam, we should just stick with God. That's what I get from Bostrom.
Ah the mind-body problem. I saw a video of Searle giving a lecture. He raised his right arm and said, "I think to myself, I'll raise my right arm. And my right arm goes up. How does that happen?"
Quoting fishfryNo they're not. They are using the word in a single consistent manner at all times. You admit that it is you that is finding two different meanings and trying to use two different words to distinguish them. Under naturalism, there is a physical system that is simulated using a model of physical laws. It's completely computational in all cases.
I acknowledged your opinion. It isn't wrong, merely inconsistent with Bostrom's naturalism opinion.
My opinion is that the economy isn't an example of something noncomputational.
With that I completely agree, which is why any computation of our physics is necessarily an approximation.
I'm unclear of the distinction between that and simulation. Bostrom says that it is humans (or 'post-humans') running the big computer. Simulation theory in general doesn't require that detail.
Not at all. I am balking at your equating a premise that science in general would find false (2+2=5) with one that science in general accepts as true (naturalism).
Good. Best they could do at the time. Even today, few non-headset games even have a first person perspective. Minecraft and Portal come to mind. I'm sure there are others, but still a small percentage. Earliest one I can think of is Battlezone. Remember that one? It pre-dates pacman I think. Ground breaking stuff it was.
Yes. "Real time". But technically, all computation has this requirement, which is one reason nobody makes real Turing machines. Imagine if you had a 4-banger calculator that took 40 years to add 2+2. Would you use it? Does that make adding 2+2 something more than computational?
A good stance, and I worded it as 'belief' instead of 'opinion', which may have been too hash. The simulation hypothesis can only be considered under the naturalism it presumes, whether or not naturalism is part of one's opinion.
Your opinion then is that we have the secret sauce, and that whatever it is, it isn't computational, although I don't know how you can infer it being noncomputational if you don't have any idea what it is. So probably also another opinion.
There isn't a separate Cartesan "I" thing under naturalism.
Explaining it and defending it are two different things. The abstract is accurate, meaning I find it reasonably valid and sound, although it seems that it has been updated since wiki lists 5 options now instead of the original 3, but the new ones seem to overlap with the old ones.
Much (the majority?) of criticism and support seem to be from people without a reasonable understanding of what it says. You can include me on that list. Don't trust what I say, but I have read the actual paper at least, and I know the difference between it, other sim proposals, and with a VR proposal. Many of the articles discussing it seem not to know the differences.
So says Bostrom, yes. Naturalism says it is if the simulation is run at a sufficiently detailed level, which is still classical, not necessarily down to the quantum level.
A VR does not produce a second consciousness for the avatar. A sufficiently detailed VR might for an NPC, but nothing like that exists in any current VR system. The current VR immersion (with the 3D headset and all) is barely better than the one for Pacman. With a good one, there'd be no controller in your hand. You would not have access to say your real body being touched.
Very likely not.
No, that isn't needed, but it is needed if the sim is gleaning intent from the physics it is simulating, and Bostrom very much does propose that it is interpreting human intent. Also, that understanding is needed for any human that is not born, but is part of the initial state. So bottom line, yea, it is needed.
A pure simulation of a human from the human's initial state has no need for knowledge of how memory and consciousness works, for the exact same reason that physics doesn't need to know the details of the workings of the things that result from the physics.
Centuries hence, it seems so. Without it, there can be no plausible initial state, unless you go back 3 billion years where the initial states were less complicated
No video game claims any understanding of what is referred to as the hard problem. If somebody references a game as an illustration of Bostrom's hypothesis, then they don't understand the difference between a sim and a VR. But they're probably just using games as one way to demonstrate Moore's law, which Bostrom presumes to continue for centuries.
If all this is a simulation, I am still very much real according to my stated definition of 'real' and you've not given yours. SH is very different than BiV and Boltzmann brains.
I don't think there is the sort of free will you're thinking if our world is a simulation. A simulation like that doesn't have causality from outside the system. If it did, it would probably be a VR. I say this, but I've done chip simulations that get driven from external state. The signals fed to the chip are artificial, not from other simulated circuits since it's only the one chip being tested. Such a chip simulation is hard to classify as a VR.
You are part of the physical evolution of the chosen initial state. That answer pretty much applies to any simulation, including all the ones I've seen done. You want to call it an instantiation and I think I see how you're using that word. A simulation is the execution (instantiation) of a mathematical model, that model itself being an approximation of some hypothetical corresponding reality. Since it is the execution of a model, it is presumably exact, except the model might include randomness, in which case the exactness is wrong since multiple instantiations of the same model will evolve differently. Bostrom does propose some randomness in his model, so not sure how 'exact' it would be. Said randomness need only be apparent, so it can be driven by a pseudo-random mechanism, which restores the deterministic nature of the simulation.
I don't think any physical thing (people or otherwise) is computational. But an approximation can be, and people are no exception to that according to science.
You're not taking down Bostrom's argument. You presume his premisies to be false. I presume them to be true, and I think his conclusion doesn't follow from them.
That's right. BiV is like the video game: an artificial (virtual) experience stream to the real (not simulated) experiencer, effectively a video game for the B in the Vat, whatever its nature.
Very unlikely for the reason's I've stated. Only if you're part of the initial state, and then only if that initial state had some kind of access to the molecular state of everybody on Earth many centuries prior, which they don't because there's no tech today that can do that.
Under Bostrom's view, the universe is a simulation, or at least something that can be seen from the simulation since most of it is just phenomenal.
Yes, our universe is what it is, and that's an intantiation in your wording. But the wording give no clue as to the nature of how it comes to be, since any story fits. Bostrom gives one possible way that it is instantiated. A deity is another. Both fail to solve the problem of 'why there's something and not nothing', but Bostrom isn't positing a solution to that problem. The deity answer often is such an attempt, and a failed one since it explains a complicated thing by positing an even more complicated thing.
I think I understand your usage of that word, and I don't in any way presume that I am instantiated. But that's me, being far more skeptical than most. Being instantiated doesn't solve any problems. I personally suspect that the sum of 2 and 2 is 4 even in the absence of anything actually performing that calculation (absence of it being instantiated). Apparently I am in the minority in this opinion.
I never said your opinion is wrong. It's just a different one than somebody else's. Different premises.
I think I'm in the minority of being somebody who has opinions X and Y and such, and I also think I'm mostly wrong about them. Some are probably right, but I realize that the odds of me getting most of them right is stupidly low.
I say that?
'God' sound like the extra assumption in that statement. Occam says it's better to ditch both the deity and the simulation layers
Quoting PatternerTotally agree. Some take that as evidence against the argument, but only because 'free will sounds like a good thing, therefore I must have it". To me it sounds like a bad thing, but I don't hold a presumption that the entities in the simulation will be held responsible for their choices, by entities not in the simulation.
.
Yay!
But may I say that earlier, you noted that these threads are getting long. I too could live with a much more focussed conversation. Actually I'm near the end of my interest in this topic. I've already stipulated that I haven't read the Bostrom paper, so for all I know, I'm misunderstanding his argument. Can we wrap this up soon? It's feeding time in my digital vat.
Quoting noAxioms
Naturalism is computationalism? I genuinely doubt that, but I'm no expert.
Quoting noAxioms
I concede that I have not read Bostrom all the way through. Every time I've taken a run at his paper in the past, my eyes glaze over, my mind says, "This is bullpucky," and I click on something else.
Quoting noAxioms
Really? The economy is the deterministic output of a computer program? Your Nobel in economics awaits if you can prove that, even if the economics Nobel is not really a Nobel.
Quoting noAxioms. That is the "video game improvement" argument I objected to earlier. We have made NO progress in implementing consciousness. No progress at all.
Quoting noAxioms
I would still be the one having the experience. The "I" having the experience. My experience is not induced by a headset. I really don't think you are thinking these matters through.
Quoting noAxioms
Can't comment on what I haven't read. If Bostrom thinks a computer can instantiate consciousness, the burden is on him to say how, since nobody has the slightest idea how.
Quoting noAxioms
Where is your evidence that computer programs are conscious? Why are you arguing this nonsensical line that you can't possibly have any evidence for?
Quoting noAxioms
So in the future there will be a breakthrough. Well who can argue with that? Will that be before or after pigs fly? You know, I can't believe Bostrom is making such a weak and nonsensical argument.
Quoting noAxioms
Quite possibly I've seen other people make the video game progress argument. If it's not Bostrom's, I have terribly maligned him. But my simulator made me do it, honest. I had no choice.
Do I have choice, by the way? Does Bostrom deny free will? My web browser can't be a word processor, no matter how hard it tries. Programs do exactly what they're programmed to do, a matter of great frustration to programmers.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't see how. If I'm a simulation running in a computer, I might as well be a brain in a vat or the only conscious thing in the universe. What distinction among these ideas do you see?
Quoting noAxioms
No free will. Ok. So sim theory is ultimately nihilistic. I murdered all those people but it wasn't my fault, Your Honor, my simulator made me do it.
Quoting noAxioms
External inputs don't matter, since programs are coded to do one thing or another thing depending on the input. Programs don't have free will by virtue of getting external inputs.
Quoting noAxioms
You contradicted yourself at least three times getting from the beginning to the end of that para. No free will but there might be if there's randomness, but it might only be pseudo-randomness, in which case it's not random after all.
Anyway I don't think I have the heart to unpack all the (in my opinion) confusion in that paragraph.
Quoting noAxioms
According to science? What serious scientist parrots a single word of this nonsense? Name and shame please. I'm not talking about Neil deG Tyson or the deluded George Smoot in a TED talk. I mean a scientist who wrote a peer-reviewed paper that says "people are no exception" ... wait, what? I went back to try to parse what you wrote and you agreed -- YOU AGREED! -- that no physical thing is computational.
Then we're done. You have accepted my point.
Yet you think I'm an approximate computation?
I urge you to think about what you are saying.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. That's interesting. Why do you think his conclusion doesn't follow from his premises? That might be interesting.
Quoting noAxioms
So brain in vat IS is like simulation after all?
Quoting noAxioms
Where are all these rules and justifications written down?
Quoting noAxioms
A simulation of what? And here we go in circles again.
Quoting noAxioms
The theists say God did it. The sim theorists say God did it and God is a Turing machine. Why am I required to spend any time at all caring about this argument?
Quoting noAxioms
Oh no, that's my point. Sim theory is God as a program, constrained by the laws of computation. That's one extra hypothesis. Unconstrained God is MORE LIKELY than constrained God. Why is God constrained to computability? If there is a God, I imagine God can solve the Halting problem (simply by looking at all the programs and seeing which ones halt) and therefore, God is not computational. That's a pretty good argument IMO.
Quoting noAxioms
Really. You're not here at all? You're imagining all this? But the thing that's imagining exists. So that was instantiated.
You were instantiated and you are instantiated at every moment of your existence.
Quoting noAxioms
That you don't exist? That takes skepticism a bit too far.
Quoting noAxioms
Nor does denying you exist.
Quoting noAxioms
That's a different subject entirely. Best if I don't respond with my opinion.
Quoting noAxioms
Well these days even that's heresy.
Quoting noAxioms
This conversation is flaming out entirely.
Quoting noAxioms
You say that Bostrom says that, but then you say you disagree with Bostrom. But here I meant you as someone in general who believe in simulation theory.
Quoting noAxioms
So you reject simulation theory. Good. We're in agreement. Let's stop arguing with each other and join forces and fight the evil simulation theorists.
How could the mind-body problem not be relevant if people are positing that sims might be people (and sometimes asserting that at least some people are sims?)
Yes. Sometimes I find his tendency to present dualism as common sense ridiculous and sometimes annoying. It reminds me of Bishop Berkeley and his wilful refusal to recognize that he is contradicting common sense.
But the rhetoric of that sentence is genius. A mystery created from a commonplace.
Quoting fishfry
I do so agree. That argument is pure hand-waving. Completely acceptable in a (conventional) fiction, where we aren't expected to ask questions.
Quoting fishfry
"Naturalism" is used much more widely than that. I've been classified as a naturalist because I reject dualism.
Quoting fishfry
Better put than I managed.
I believe in that same lecture (or perhaps a different one) he did NOT advocate dualism. He advocated what I call "secret sauce," my phrase, not Searle's. That is, consciousness is physical, but not computational. That's the point I've been making to @noAxioms.
Quoting Ludwig V
I thought naturalism (as I understand it, based on a five second lookup) is the exact opposite of dualism. Is naturalism = physicalism? Or is there a further distinction?
My point is that naturalism is not necessarily computationalism. Mind could be physical but not computatational. This is something I believe, though of course proof is lacking.
Quoting Ludwig V
Thanks, but noAxioms doesn't believe in the word.
[quote=Bostrom]
Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as
they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine?grained and if a certain
quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct).
[/quote]
As you know, I am not one of those who "widely accept" this utterly unprovable and extremely unlikely claim. I can't see reading further. Bostrom assumes that consciousness can be implemented on a computer. I say no. It can't.
I found something else that stops me from reading the rest of the paper. It's the very first sentence.
[quote=Bostrom]
Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists
and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be
available in the future.[/quote]
Yes. But no matter how enormous the amount of computing power we have, it can not and does not increase the space of problems we can solve. That's the essence of computability. More power makes the computation run faster. It can't compute anything that wasn't already computable before.
So now I see why I can never get into the Bostrom paper. Right in the first paragraph, he loses all credibility with me. It's a core assumption that computers can create consciousness. There's no evidence for that. Why read further? I'll concede that IF consciousness is computational, then I'm already a "simulation," ie an executing computer program. And who's the simulator? God or a future civilization? What difference does it make if I'm a program either way?
So even if he's right, there's no reason to read the rest of it. Computational consciousness is one of his core assumptions. If it's false, the paper's worthless. If it's true, the paper's trivial.
And if the simulators are a future civilization, who created them? In the end it's either "God did it," or "We don't know." So this paper adds nothing. He slipped in the computational consciousness assumption, in which case there's actually nothing else to say. We're all executing programs.
Oh, and instead of justifying and supporting his computational consciousness claim, he blithely says it's "widely accepted." By whom?
Once again, I'm dismayed at how many otherwise clever people take this paper seriously. And once again, I could not get past the introduction and the first paragraph.
Characters in a story have no will at all. Their will is at best that of the author, and perhaps the author is responsible for their actions.
Quoting fishfryNaturalism is not-dualism. No secret sauce.
Physics is not computational, but an approximation of it is, sufficient to simulate consciousness.
Strawman. I never said that.
The way you seem to define instantiation, you are one whether or not Bostrom's hypothesis is true.
Your assertion. I disagree. I do agree that video games are not where this progress is being made since no video game to date has need of it.
Thee simulator implements physics. Physics implements your consciousness, regardless of whether the physics is simulated or not. Under supernaturalism, this isn't true.
The program has no need of being conscious, just like atoms are not conscious. You are conscious, not the program, not the physics that underpins how your consciousness works.
Technically, a simulation of some system is far simpler than say microsoft code, but it is also much larger since it needs far more data than the capacity of say some desktop.
That's right, which is why a video game is not a model of the simulation argument. Sim is not VR. Video games are VR. VR is dualism. Sim is physicalism.
It's not on him to say how. It's on those GS guys 10 centuries from now. Part of being 'posthuman' is apparently that they've figured it all out, at least far enough to glean focus and intent from watching raw physics happen, because the algorithm he suggests depends on these things.
Strawman. I never said they were. If this world is a sim, it isn't any program that is conscious, it is just us. I don't think this world is a sim.
A lot of them, yes. Far more than I can accept.
Patterner above makes a good reply to this. Determinism made me do it. I'm not responsible. Doesn't work that way.
Nicely illustrating the mistake of equivocating choice and free will. Don't need the latter to have the former, as evidenced by our having evolved expensive brains to make better choices. Free will does not add any survival benefit.
Unless the external input IS the will, as it is in any VR.
You've identified no contradictions. Randomness is not free will. I did not mention free will in the paragraph quoted. There is no free will in Bostrom's proposal.
You asked what Bostrom's sim is a simulation of. I answered that.
Per the methodological naturalism under which science operates. If one presumes otherwise, it isn't science.
I never said any such thing. You do like putting crazy words in my mouth.
I urge you to read what I'm saying.
I urge you to read what I'm saying.
I urge you to read what sim theorists are saying, because it certainly isn't that, and it isn't anything I've said.
First option: We never get 'posthuman'. His description of the requirement for this posthuman state is so high that the probability of option 1 being the case is 1 to an awful lot of digits. His argument requires that probability to be close to zero. I could go on, but that's enough.
I am quite here, no problem. But I'm not a realist, and 'instantiation' seems to be synonymous with 'to be made real in some way', or more exactly, to set the property of being real to true. I define being real as a relation, not a property like realism does, so an instantiator ceases to be a necessity.
You asked. I don't expect you to accept it, and you'll no doubt bend it to something I didn't say.
No, I just have a different definition of 'to exist', a relation, not a property. And yes, this very much solves a problem that plagued me for years, one that comes up in this forum frequently since the typical answers don't work.
And you said that my (minority) view didn't solve any problems, yet here is one that isn't solved by the more mainstream stances.
Quoting Ludwig VMind-body problem is only relevant to dualism, and sim theory isn't dualism, so the there's no problem. I think the term is 'interactionism', how the dual aspects interact with each other.
It's very relevant to a VR. How does my decision to point a gun at the baddie cause Lara Croft to raise her arm? There has to be a causal connection between my decision and her arm, and there is. But under sim theory, there isn't two separate things that need to interact, so the problem doesn't arise. If Bostrom is wrong about his philosophy of mind, then his hypothesis falls flat.
Quoting fishfryWait, Bostrom said that mind is not computational, and yet pushes a view that our consciousness is the result of a computation? That seems to be a direct denial of his own paper. Got a link to where this is said?
Quoting fishfryIt's really hard to critique the paper if you cannot set your personal beliefs aside for a moment and take a non-dualist perspecitve for a moment. The inability to do so renders yours objections invalid, as evidenced by all the strawman statements you make above.
Nobody is asking you to accept his conclusion or believe his premises.
The science of neural biology for one. There's possibly an exception to that, but I've never seen it: Somebody presuming your stance and implementing the scientific method to actually investigate it. Amazing that nobody tries such an obvious empirical thing.
You are quite right. Enthusiasts are fascinated by the speculative possibilities and so forget the provisos. It's really quite annoying.
Quoting fishfry
That's not exactly wrong. But let analytic philosophers loose on an -ism and in a few years you'll have dozens of them. In the first half of the last century, there wasn't a concept of computability, so that issue is undetermined.
[quote=Stanford EP - Naturalism;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/]The term naturalism has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed naturalists from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing supernatural, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the human spirit[/quote]
[quote=Wikipedia - Naturalism;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)]In philosophy, naturalism is the idea that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe.[1] In its primary sense,[2] it is also known as ontological naturalism, metaphysical naturalism, pure naturalism, philosophical naturalism and antisupernaturalism.[/quote]
Quoting fishfry
I'm clearly out of date. Apologies to Searle. However, I'm not much reassured. If Searle is positing consciousness as an unknown something-or-other in addition to what is currently recognized as physical, he is positing a consciousness of the gaps, which is at least close to dualism.
The mistake is to start with "Consciousness is....". We know what consciousness is; we don't know how to explain the physical basis of consciousness - yet. But it is clear that there are many disparate phenomena involved and it is possible that consciousness will not map neatly onto the physical world. (Consider the many complicated physical phenomena that are involved in the emotions, for example).
Quoting noAxioms
I apologize. I should have referred more generally to "philosophical theories of the mind". Bostrom clearly has one, though he proceeds as if it was certainly correct. A serious error, in my book.
Quoting noAxioms
If there is a causal connection between my decision to point a gun and Lara Croft raising her arm, there are two things that interact. That's what causality means. Whether you are dualist, monist, physicalist, idealist, epiphenomenonalist or panpsychist.
Quoting noAxiomsDoes naturalism state that we currently know of all things natural?
Do we have any inkling of how brains are conscious?
A self-driving car makes choices, unless you're the type to forbid such language being applicable to something other than a human doing it. Yet most would agree it has no free will. Again, I see no benefit of free will (an action whose causal chain isn't rooted in physical state somewhere) to be preferable to actions whose causal chain is rooted in physical state. Crossing the street is my typical example of this.
I suspect that they're better choices if they're not free. Being 'free' seems to imply being controlled by an external entity, which I consider equivalent to being possessed. One never knows if what possesses you has your best interests in mind, especially if its survival isn't dependent on the survival of that which it possesses.
Quite the opposite. It implies that it is far better to say "We don't know how X works yet" than to say "X? Oh, that's done by Gods, magic, woo, whatever. The latter attitude discourages research. The former methodology encourages it.
Hence the dark ages when methodological supernaturalism was prevalent, and the explosion of knowledge when methodological naturalism took over some 7 centuries ago give or take.
If your question is about a new kind of physics that implements mind, well, if it can be shown that such is how it really works, then it falls under naturalism, yes. But nobody is treating it as something that can be investigated. The whole point of woo is that it be based on faith in lieu of lack of evidence. So empirical research into any of it is discouraged.
Quoting Ludwig VQuite right, and there very much is such a connection in that example.
There's a difference. With physicalism, there's a wire connecting the physical system where the will is implemented, to the system where the motor control (and eventually the arm) is implemented. Under dualism, that causal chain is seemingly broken/unknown, and it's a problem that needs to be solved, something that isn't a problem for the monist.
I don't know how Searle claims a solution to this problem, but I will lay odds it involves persuasion rather than empirical investigation.
Quoting RogueAI
You're asking somebody who claims brains are not. Heck, even I am one of them since I wouldn't consider a brain on its own to be conscious. it is beings/complete systems, not just brains, that are conscious or not, per a physicalist view.
No answer to this question will ever satisfy a dualist. Any progress towards such knowledge is waved off as correlation, not actual consciousness. I mean they have machines that know the choice you will make before you do yourself. "Oh, that's just correlation".
Anyway, the existence of such a device does not mean that we know how biological beings are conscious.
-Physical interactions determine the final arrangement of the pool balls after the break.
-Physical interactions determine whether a bunch of particles will gather into a planet orbiting a star; become a loose gathering, such as the asteroid belt; or scatter to the various directions of space.
-Physical interactions determine if and when solid H2O will become liquid, and vice versa.
-Physical interactions cause the globe's weather patterns.
-Physical interactions determine what a person has for dinner, or how a person deals with a cheating spouse.
It is only when talking about what humans (some people include other animals) do that anyone calls the outcome [i]choice[/I]. Why is that? The planet's weather is the result of more particles than are in our brains, and a huge number of different types of physical activity (gravity, tides, solar radiation, the many different ecosystems of all areas of the worlds, all states of matter, human activity, etc.) are involved. Yet, even there, we do not speak of choice or will. Why do we only when the physical activity within a human brain is involved?
I notice you seem to use the verbs 'cause' and 'determine' somewhat interchangeably there. I agree with all, but I want to highlight some distinctions, the main one being, 'under physical monism' (not dualism), all the above is true, since some (not just the last one) is not true under dualism.
All of them are examples of 'physical interactions cause this and that'. The word 'determines' implies determinism, that not only does state X cause state Y, but state X can only cause Y and not any different outcome Z. There are valid deterministic interpretations of physics and valid nondeterministic ones, so we don't know if physics is deterministic or not.
The second important point is: the lack of determinism does not imply free will, it only implies randomness, and randomness is not what makes free will possible. It isn't information (enaction of choice) from outside physical interactions of matter. Randomness conveys no information, hence cannot enact the external choice necessary for free will.
Hence yes, determinism or no, under physicalism, an external entity cannot hold a physical entity responsible for how the physics works in this universe. Internal entities can, so justice is served if I go to jail for setting my cat on fire, but not if I go to hell for it, as if it is even meaningful to put a physically meaningful arrangement of matter into a non-physically meaningful state.
How is this relevant to the simulation hypothesis? Well, the runners of the simulation have no meaningful way to exert their ideas of a moral standard on the states of matter in their simulation. OK, the simulators could sprinkle a bunch of 'divine scripture' copies here and there as part of the initial state of the simulation, but the runners really have no way of doing anything about it if someone in the sim doesn't follow the rules spelled out in the scripture. Lightning strikes from above would render it into an interactive VR for the simulators, and no longer a pure sim. It would reduce the occupants of our world to NPCs, zombies in a world with only one or a few actual free willed VR players (the ones aiming the lightning strikes, or whatever method they choose to implement their interference).
Speak for yourself. I picked the cars as an example since I consider it to be making choices, even if I don't think it is a very good example of AI. They're complicated, but still very much automatons, but they do make choices about which route, which lane to use, and so on. If that's not choice, then fundamentally, as a physicalist, what am I doing that is different?
My decision to not burn the cat is also the result of more particles than is in my brain. In fact, that choice is a function of pretty much everything else you listed. It is not a function of matter 50 billion light years away. That's how far I need to go.
Because that's how language is used, and language usage, more than anything else, sets one's biases.
You grabbed a statement I made to @Ludwig V about Searle, interpolated Bostrom, and snapped back me for a link to something you imagined I said?
I was a little put off by this latest post. You sniped at literally every sentence I wrote.
I was more interested in taking the discussion in the direction of my new understanding that Bostrom explicitly says that in the future they'll figure out how to implement consciousness on a computerer .
In my mind that renders the conversation moot. If that assumption is false, the paper is wrong. If it's true, then I'm a program running in a computer, and it doesn't matter if God or future people did it. So the paper doesn't say anything interesting.
That kind of wrapped it up for me. And it clarified a point I've been wondering about, which is what Bostrom says about computational consciousness. He assumes it. Hell of an assumption to casually slip in, rather that explicitly noting it.
Anyway I don't think I could add value by sniping back at every sentence-by-sentence dispute, so I think my best bet is to leave this as it is.
People keep using the word naturalism and I'm trying to understand what it means. Is it the same or different than physicalism?
Quoting Ludwig V
He associates it with life. Something about living things. And surely we haven't got a computer science theory of when a program running on a digital computer becomes alive. Any more than we know when it becomes conscious. Or if, rather than when. What is the spark of life? Some call it the soul. The thing that's present when you're a live, absent when you're dead, and nobody knows what it is? Maybe consciousness is something that comes along with that.
That is my understanding of my own recollection of what Searle said in a video I watched a couple of years ago. No claim that Searle holds or ever held this position as I explained it. But it sounds reasonable. It's a coherent belief. Something about life is conducive to consciousness.
A computationalist would call that very human-centric, like geocentrism. Destined by analogy with history to look silly someday.
Quoting Ludwig V
I'm sticking to physicalism without computationalism till I get some new input on the subject.
Emotions are another good example, thanks for that. They're squirts of hormones in the limbic system or some such. Nobody understands how it works. It doesn't seem very computer-like to me.
I don't. Science doesn't. But the computationalists, they are very sure of themselves. Consciousness is something that can be implemented by a computer program. And the arguments are specious. We process information, computers process information, therefore we're like computers. Weighted nodes in a graph are just like neurons. You can't argue with these people. They control TED, hence the popular "educated, sophisticated" mind. It's better to go along with what all the other cool kids say. Consciousness is computational, we're in a simulation, aren't we clever.
A lot of really smart people, too. Cognitive neuroscientists, rock star CEOs of AI companies. Who am I to argue?
Thanks for asking :-)
No, they are not just hormones. The causes of the hormones in the brain and the effects of the hormones in the body, together with their psychological counterparts are all part of the package. Think about it.
I could think about it a lot, without ever figuring out what you were trying to tell me here!
I thought I was agreeing with you, that emotions are an argument against computationalism. But perhaps I misunderstood.
But that's an issue that goes back millennia. A century ago, there was "elan vital" or "Life Force". Before that, it was the "mind", the "soul". Aristotle's "psyche",
Searle's mystery component can be seen in his Chinese Room. It is (from what you tell me and my memories) just a gesture towards something in the future.
Quoting fishfry
I'm sorry. It was lazy of me to do that.
One point about it was indeed that the physical basis of the emotions is clearly not just a matter of processing information. The focus on the brain, together with the computer analogy, misleads us. Even the knowledge that we already have should prevent us from thinking that there is necessarily any simple correlation between mental and physical phenomena. People equate fear and anger with the circulation of specific hormones. But that is, surely, clearly not the sort of thing that our computers can do. It is one phenomenon in among others that are associated with the emotions. The brain, presumably, is involved in triggering the release and the whole of the rest of the body is affected. Compare the call of "action stations" in a ship or perhaps the fire alarm in a building. Everything is affected. There's no way of picking out the specifics, except by the general description "ready for action" or "falling in love".
Computers of the kind we are familiar with do not (so far as I can see) have any capacity to be afraid or fall in love, to value one outcome over another and one of the reasons for that, it seems to me, is that the way they "think" has no conceptual space for those things. (Though I'm sure that some people will respond to the challenge by developing simulations.)
I'm going to stop there. There's not much I'm sure of beyond this point, except that philosophers don't seem to be able to grapple sensibly with what's going on here.
Quoting fishfryFor purposes of this discussion, I've been using the two terms interchangeably.
Quoting Ludwig VIf this world is part of a simulation, it is definitely going to have to simulate chemical/hormonal influences on our experience. Far more than that even.
Much of my skepticism of SH is that he proposes that the physics of a system changes depending on how much attention is being paid to it.
I don't think a proper critique requires the critic to set aside their opinion. But it does require a willingness to engage with the opposition. I think he has an extreme form of a regrettable, but not uncommon, tendency to adopt a premiss (axiom, "truism") which presupposes his conclusion. But to be fair Derrida, in their famous debate, does not exactly go overboard to understand Austin, but I thought that he did at least try to do so.
I need to correct myself. I found an entry on Google Books:-
[quote=GoogleBooks on Searle's Theory of Perception;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Seeing_Things_as_They_are/3jfvBQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0]With special emphasis on vision Searle explains how the raw phenomenology of perception sets the content and the conditions of satisfaction of experience. ...... He next justifies the claim that perceptual experiences have presentational intentionality and shows how this justifies the direct realism of his account.[/quote]
For my money, this doesn't amount to direct realism. Note the references to "raw phenomenology" and "presentational intentionality". But I can see why one might pigeon-hole him under that heading. But I'm quoting the summary, not Searle himself. Perhaps there's a distortion in that.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes. Only a naive person like myself would want to differentiate the two. But I had in mind the much-abused ordinary experience that was so popular in Oxford at a certain point; it seemed better to call it naturalism.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes. The question is How much more? Emotions (as opposed to moods) have a cognitive content, and that wouldn't be a problem. But they also involve desire and value. That is extremely problematic. It seems to me that software commands can simulate emotion, but having an emotion (desire, value) is a very different kettle of fish.
Quoting noAxiomsThat's what I'm asking.
Quoting noAxiomsI suspect the reason believers who don't engage in empirical research don't engage in empirical research is their minds aren't strong in that area. "God did it" and "How does it work" are not incompatible thoughts. Francis Collins is such a strong believer that, when he finished mapping the human genome, he called it the Language of God. Also Mendel, Carver, Maxwell, Cantor, Kelvin, Heisenberg, and many others.
Other minds don't much function in one sphere or the other. Some see the two as incompatible, and are opposed, even violently, to the one they don't function in.
Some don't seem inclined to either.
I don't see a fundamental difference, so 'other people' must answer your question since you say that "It is only when talking about what humans (some people include other animals) do that anyone calls the outcome choice", which implies that only living things have choice. But 'living' is just a language tag. There's no physical difference between a thing designated as living and one that isn't. They're both (per the naturalism view) just material doing what material does.
DNA doesn't explain how supernatural will has the agency to move one's arm. Searle apparently did a talk on how one can willfully move one's arm, but I don't know how he claims to have solved the problem. I'm pretty confident that there's a step in there that require hand-waving or begging or some such, but I've not seem a link to what he says.
- - - -
On the subject of computability: Where does randomness come into play? I've posted above that classical physics is computational, but there are valid classical situations where effects occur uncaused, such as described by Norton: "acausality in classical physics".
The cleanest example was a particle on a cone that can at any random time slide off it, or remain at the top indefinitely. Computable physics is supposedly deterministic, but here's a case where the simulator is forced to pick a random value.
Quoting Ludwig VWell, all of it, but I see the question being, at what point can we back off on the level of detail simulated? Simulation is necessarily an approximation, and the further away you get (say the wall to your left), the more you can approximate the physics of it, if the intent is mostly to make the simulation undetectable to the humans. The bugs on the wall will notice, but the sim is not giving them buggy experience. The bugs are but phenomena to the humans, not things that have phenomenal experience themselves. All the above is per Bostrom, describing how the simulation could be optimized. But if the simulation does this (inconsistent physics between say the wall and one's gut biome), then it opens the door for empirical ways to detect this, but it gets hard because the sim is an AI that gleans intent, and it would change the physics of the bug if one focuses sufficient interest in one.
I find all of that list to be part of cognitive content, but with chemical influences as well. Fear is a very chemical emotion, but fear is necessarily initiated as a cognitive function: One must conclude a danger of some sort first before the chemicals come into play.
Software is not driving any emotions in the sim described. It is just simulating molecular interactions or some such, essentially an uncomplicated task. It is the molecules that are arranged into a person who has real emotions that emerge from the molecular activity, never simulated emotions.
Fundamentally, the software could be a trivial program that does only that. Give it particles and forces and such, and off you go. It would need an insane amount of power and memory, but a relatively trivial code base.
But Bostrom adds a lot more to the software requirement because it needs to know which molecules comprise a set of particles that is designated as a human, and it needs to glean intent from that human so that it can change the physics of some systems when necessary. Now the software is a million times more complicated, but the extra code is worth it for the optimization it buys.
Code which is influenced by chemistry. Good luck with that.
Quoting noAxioms
That's just a version of Laplace's demon. Hand-waving.
Quoting noAxioms
That's just a lot of hand-waving.
I'm sorry to be so abrupt. But I've tried to follow the detailed arguments to no avail.
Another word for determinism, and determinism is not hand waving. It's simply a valid philosophical view.
Yes, that part is hand waving. It assumes that the hard problem isn't hard, or rather, that there isn't a hard problem. The hard problem, as stated, is also hand waving, and will by definition never be solved, regardless of the progress of science and the success of a simulation such as Bostrom describes. The runners of the simulation have zero evidence that the simulated people are conscious as defined by the dualists, as opposed to p-zombies.
It's an intermediate position between physicalism and computationalism. Whether it's true or just superstition, we'll have to find out.
Quoting Ludwig V
I think you agreed with me and expressed my thoughts. If so, thanks!
I totally don't get what you said.
Searle is making an entirely naturalist premise. He denied dualism. He says consciousness is physical, just not computational. How do you get from that, to "Searle isn't going to accept a naturalist premise?" He's insisting on a naturalist premise, isn't he?
Again I must emphasize that I am not claiming Searle made this point; only that I interpreted what he was saying as his making this point in a video I watched a couple of years ago. For all I know I made up the whole thing.
But whether or not it's Searle's point, it's my point. Consciousness is physical, but not computational. Penrose has argued the same point.
The opposite of computational is not superstition or dualism. It's that there is something else going on that is not computational, but still physical.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok thanks. So the view that I ascribe to Searle is naturalism. Don't know why you interpreted my explanation as the opposite.
Computationalism is not physicalism.
Penrose's view is described in his book, The Emperor's New Mind.
Wiki says:
Penrose argues that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, and thus is not capable of being modeled by a conventional Turing machine, which includes a digital computer. Penrose hypothesizes that quantum mechanics plays an essential role in the understanding of human consciousness. The collapse of the quantum wavefunction is seen as playing an important role in brain function.
This may be a crackpot idea, but at least it's Sir Roger's crackpot idea. And as someone said, Sir Roger's bad ideas are better than most people's good ones.
But there is a conceptual link between danger and fear that makes it hard to understand what recognizing a danger could be if one didn't fear it.
Quoting noAxioms
I hope I'm free to disagree with you?
Quoting noAxioms
So we agree on something.
Quoting noAxioms
And that adds up to genuine emotion?
As do most people. If determinism is true, then you still disagree, but the disagreement isn't free. I also want to point out that my personal opinion isn't one that supports determinism, but that doesn't mean the view is 'hand waving' or that it's wrong.
"I believe X, therefore any other view is wrong" is essentially closed mindedness, an encouraged attitude for religion, but a terrible one for pursuit of truth. And no, I most certainly don't claim my view to be truth.
If Bostrom's hypothesis is true, and your definition of 'genuine' doesn't include simulated cognition influenced by simulated chemistry, then your emotion is indeed not genuine. That's the best I can answer without a clear definition of 'genuine' in this context.
Quoting fishfryI really need a quote on that for context. He asserts that mind works differently than everything else physical. Sounds like dualism to me. If it can be show that it really works that way, then physics needs to be rewritten to include this magic as part of naturalism.
And how has this been demonstrated? He has no more evidence of that than the science community has that it IS computational, but even a rock rolling down a hill hasn't been shown to be computational.
Point is, it's no big claim to say something isn't computational. The big claim is one that says that the effect in question cannot function in a computational way.
I can computationally simulate an approximation of the rock rolling down the hill, a simulation that will yield almost any property I want of a rolling rock.
Bostrom's hypothesis suffers from this. A simulation seems necessarily classical, and yet science has demonstrated (Bell's theorem for starters) that our physics isn't classical. So Bostrom has to modify his hypothesis to change physics when attention is paid to it, to make it appear non-classical when in fact it actually is. That make the job of the simulation so very much more difficult.
Again, how do you know this? Fervent belief, or something with actual evidence? Are you asserting (without evidence) that something computational cannot be conscious? Or is it the weaker claim that consciousness simply exists in a classical environment that emerges from non-classical underlying physics? I would fully agree with the latter statement, but I know of zero evidence for the former.
The same could be said of a transistor in a computer, the operation of which is utterly dependent on quantum effects. It doesn't mean that one cannot create a classical simulation of a transistor, something that is done all the time.
Penrose may hypothesize these things, but hypothesizing and demonstrating are two different things. In particular, he suggests that consciousness is dependent on wave function collapse, but wave function collapse has never been demonstrated. If it had, then all the interpretations that deny wave function collapse (about half of the ones listed on Wiki) would have been falsified.
He's expressing opinion, as are you. I try to keep my opinions out of the discussion, and try very hard not to escalate them to assertions.
I have stipulated that I am not quoting Searle; but rather quoting my memory of what I understood of something he said in a video I watched several years ago. I could have misremembered, misunderstood at the time, or both. Clearly there is no hope of my finding the quote unless I go searching for Searle videos.
Can we just start from what I also said, that I am willing to make this maxim my own. Consciousness is physical but not computational. Now I have said that, and I believe it (obviously without proof), and the quote is right there. So we can discuss that, I hope.
Quoting noAxioms
Forget Searle. I'll own the position myself. And what you said is clearly wrong. LOTS of things are physical but not computational. The universe, for example. I have no proof of that either, nor do you have proof that the universe is computational.
If you have proof that everything physical is computational, feel free to post it, link it, or publish it. Or just admit it's your opinion. That's all anyone can have regarding these matters, till someone makes a heck of a scientific breakthrough.
Quoting noAxioms
Now that, I do not understand. We have a deep understanding of the limits of computation. Why do you think that anything non-computational must be spiritual or non-physical? You have no proof of that.
Quoting noAxioms
There is no demonstration of the proposition or its negation.
Quoting noAxioms
Wait, now you're agreeing with me. If a rock rolling down a hill hasn't been shown to be computational, then you admit that you claim that "everything physical is computational" has no proof.
So we each have an opinion, and nobody has a proof. I hope we can agree on that.
Quoting noAxioms
You have gone a long way towards agreeing with me. If a rock rolling downhill might not be computational, then surely consciousness might not be either.
Quoting noAxioms
You seem to be making a distinction between "computaional" and "functioning in a computational way." I do not understand that distinction. Unless by "functioning in a computational way" you mean something that can be approximated or simulated by an abstract model. But that is not functioning that way -- it's only being approximated that way.
I assume you agree.
Quoting noAxioms
I agreed with you right up till you said, "any property I want." Clearly we can't do that, because we haven't got a theory of quantum gravity, meaning that we have not yet got a complete theory of gravity. So there are SOME properties, tiny little wobbles, that we can NOT simulate or approximate, because we haven't got enough physics. Dark matter is a good example. Our greatest and most precise computer simulations of gravity can't get the predictions right, because we haven't yet got a good theory.
Quoting noAxioms
Having read enough of the first page of the paper to throw it down in annoyance again, I think you are wrong about what he says.
He explicitly assumes that the "simulation" implements consciousness. How this happens he has no idea, but he assures us that this is "widely believed." By the TED talkers he hangs out with, I'm sure. By me, not so much.
So he is (in my reading) NOT talking about simulation as approximation; or simulation as a perfect implementation of an abstract model that captures most but not all of a system's behaviors. He is talking about my consciousness, this noisy voice in my head and the feeling of the keys under my fingertips, the pleasant sensation of the soft breeze coming in the open window, being literally implemented, instantiated, created by the "simulation." I find that most unlikely, for the simple reason that I don't think computer programs have inner lives. Of course I'm just saying I don't believe it because I don't believe it, so I haven't convinced anyone.
So he is using the word simulation to mean instantiation or creation; and NOT approximation or execution of an abstract model. I believe that. I will go back to the paper and read a little more and see if I can either find more ammo or perhaps a refutation of my belief. But as it stands, I reiterate that what Bostrom means by simulation, he should call instantiation or creation, so as not to confuse it with a simulation of gravity, which is an instantiation of an abstract model and not the real thing.
Remember: Simulations of gravity do not attract nearby bowling balls. I hope you will consider this.
Genuine=Not simulated. If I'm experiencing fear, the fear is real.
Quoting noAxioms
But my point is that the recognition and the reflex response are both the fear. Both causally and phenomenologically.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, I don't really think that determinism is just hand-waving. It is much more serious than that.
Quoting noAxioms
Isn't that hand-waving? It looks very much like it to me. So does Laplace's description of his demon. In addition, his thought-experiment describes predictability as opposed to determinism.
OK, by those two strangely unaligned definitions, if Bostrom's hypothesis is true, then your experience of fear is real, but not genuine.
I don't see that. For one, there is no power requirement for a simulation at all, except the impatience of the runners of the simulation. As for memory, why would a deterministic simulation need any more memory than a non-deterministic one? They would seem to have similar requirements as far as I can see. Do you know what determinism is? I suspect otherwise.
How would one implement a non-deterministic simulation? It would have to employ a real random number generator somewhere, something that does say a quantum amplification,. No current CPU has such an instruction, but one could be implemented.
Finally, determinism isn't an interpretation of simulations. It is part of interpretations of physics. Relativity theory for instance is deterministic, but also incomplete.
That experiment has been shown to be wrong.
Per wiki:
[quote=wiki][Per Laplace], According to determinism, if someone (the demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics.[/quote]
This is completely false. 1, I have shown an example just above (Norton) where classical mechanics does not do this. 2, Our universe is not classical
None of the interpretations of physics, not even the fully deterministic ones, are consistent with the claim made above by Laplace.
Quoting fishfry
I'll do better. I retract much of what I said of Searle. I read the transcript of his Ted talk, and yes, he seems to attempt to stay physical. I perhaps have mixed up some assertions from Chalmers, It is Chalmers that needs to explain how the arm goes up, not Searle, who seems to have a consistent story about this.
The Ted talk seemed to play the language game. If two things are doing the exact same thing, it is 'X' if a human does it, and it is not X if a machine does it. That's what I got from it.
I got nothing from him that suggests that human consciousness cannot be simulated, that it isn't computational. That bit seems to be your assertion.
My apologies if I seem to respond to most of your comments. We both tend to do that, which makes the replies lengthy. I try to edit out repetitive replies.
Why do you want this to be the case? It doesn't seem to be just a random assertion.
I've said as much, but it doesn't prevent the running of simulations of parts of the universe. Why can all the other parts be simulated, but a human cannot? It's not like the simulated human has a different reality to compare, and say "Hey, this consciousness feels different than a genuine consciousness does!". Maybe it 'feels' totally different from one person to the next, and not just from one universe to the next.
None of it is about proof. But a shred of evidence always helps. I have no proof that the universe isn't computational, but the evidence suggests that. If we're 'in a sim', the sim has to go out of its way to fake that evidence. Bostrom addresses this problem.
You seem to think I assert this, or even that it's my opinion. It isn't. Evidence suggests otherwise. There's no proof either way.
OK, so we're back to zero evidence for your opinion, which doesn't make the opinion wrong, but it also isn't evidence against the SH. It only renders SH something you won't believe because it conflicts with your opinion.
That's where we differ. I don't reject something because of conflicts with my opinions. I don't consider my opinion to count as evidence one way or another.
Science is not about proof. I've always agreed with you on this point. Evidence suggests physics is noncomputatinal, and a rolling rock (a genuine one, not a simple approximation of one) is physics.
Yea, but my opinion doesn't count, except that my opinion rejects Bostrom's probability argued to the first two options.
And my point is that like the rolling rock, it being noncomputational doesn't prevent it from being simulated to enough precision that it works. There's no evidence that consciousness is dependent on non-computability. If it was, then indeed, it could not be simulated at all. The lack of evidence of this dependency means that the SH isn't falsified by this [lack of] evidence. Falsification requires evidence.
Yes, you got it. Functioning in a computational way means being approximated to sufficient precision. I can approximate a car crash to sufficient detail that when I finally make a genuine car, I will know how safe it is, how it handles specific collision scenarios.
Note that I am using here and earlier the word 'genuine' as defined by Ludwig at the top of this post, since his definition of 'real' would not be fitting.
OK, I grant that. I just want to know if the rock will bust in two when it hits that other rock, or if it will essentially bounce off with only small fragments ejecting. I don't expect the simulation to predict exactly which atoms within it will decay during the time simulated. No amount of precision will predict that.
Those we can predict with enough precision, with enough detail of initial state. Those are classical properties. They do have simulations of dark matter, and they explain the unusual rotation curves of some galaxies. The simulations show how those galaxies seem to have little dark matter in them compared to most. The simulations don't get the predictions correct partly due to the inability to guess correctly at initial conditions. Bostrom doesn't seem to address this problem in his paper. It is apparently 'hand waved' away. How does one set up initial conditions of this 'ancestor simulation'? Apparently an exercise for the people of the future to solve,
Yes, he does. This point obviously grates against your opinion enough to prevent further reading.
Yes, that's what he's talking about. I thought that was clear, even from the abstract.
He does not suggest that we're computer programs. Being a program is very different than being simulated by one. You don't buy the hypothesis because it conflicts with your beliefs. Nothing wrong with that.
I hate to say it, but how does instantiation differ from execution of a model? I thought I had got it right, but now you're treating these terms as distinct.
No, but simulated bowling balls are attracted to each other (not much). Either that or the gravity simulation isn't as accurate to sufficient precision. Most gravity simulations don't go to that precision.
I think that is what Searle is saying. Except that he doesn't consider raising an arm to be "the exact same thing" if it is done by you or me and if it is done by a machine. The issue is what the difference is. From what I've seen is that he thinks that there is some causal difference between the two. I think the difference is only partly empirical, but the difference between two different language-games. One, the game that the concept of a person defines; the other the game that the concept of a machine defines.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, there is a problem there.
Quoting noAxioms
Could we just say "recognition of something as dangerous" or "recognition of a danger"? Anyway, if I've understood what a simulation is supposed to be, it involves feeding me information that is false. False information can easily trigger real or genuine fear. So the fear is not actually appropriate in that situation, but it would be misleading to call it simulated because that suggests that I am not really afraid. I'm not sure what the right word would be.
You said:-
Quoting noAxioms
I said:-
Quoting Ludwig V
You replied:-
Quoting noAxioms
I don't understand what you are saying. It may well be true. But I don't care about the difference between a deterministic simulation and a non-deterministic one. I do care about the difference between reality and a simulation of it.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, I don't really think that determinism is just hand-waving. It is much more serious than that.
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
Well, at least we are agreed that Laplace's demon is out of date.
Quoting noAxioms
I used to know, but then I did a bit of reading and now I don't. But everybody else does seem to know, or think they know. If determinism is not about physics, - and the SEP does say that it is not - then what is it about? Or is it perhaps as out of date and the demon?
No, that sounds like a VR. I say that, but since Bostrom posits the changing of physics when you pay attention to the thing, his vision of a simulation does feed the simulated humans lies, in particular, that the universe is non-computational, when in fact it is a computation.
It can't be genuine since the person experiencing the fear is not genuine. The fear of being bit by the dog is very real and not false information, but the dog is apparently an NPC per Bostrom, just a mindless object controlled by AI, at least until you look closer, which most people don't.
You are really afraid. If the dog bits you, it will hurt. You might bleed. You might get a permanent scar.
Happened to me. Friendliest Pitt Bull I ever saw, and we played with it a while. There was danger but no fear. It had previously been romping through the poison ivy which covered me with the stuff, and I didn't know it until way too late. Lost vision in one eye, fixed by cataract surgery, my 'permanent scar'.
By your definition of 'real', the simulation IS reality to the people in it. It simply isn't real to the people running the simulation, but Bostrom doesn't posit that we're the ones running it. We're not 'posthuman', as he puts it.
Laplace's demon is a story illustrating/presuming determinism, which you declared to be hand waving, and now declaring it to not be just hand waving.
Perhaps I misunderstand how you interpret the Laplace's demon story. Anyway, I agree that determinism is not hand waving. It doesn't appear to be falsifiable.
Very much so, yes. It just doesn't mean that determinism has died with the demon.
Determinism says that subsequent states of a closed system is fixed, given an exact initial state. It means that a system will evolve the same way, every time, from the same initial state. It implies all effects have a cause.
This is the case for a computer program running a simulation, unless the program has some kind of randomness instruction it can access.
Determinism does not imply that one can subjectively predict subsequent states, since knowledge of the initial state is impossible, per Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Laplace's demon is an objective observer (whatever that means), not a subjective one.
A simple example of uncaused phenomena is the decay of some unstable particle. It's half-life is known, which yields a time after which it is 50% likely to have already decayed, but it is completely unpredictable when the actual decay will occur.
An interpretation like Bohmian mechanics asserts that there are hidden variables that cause this, and if they could be consistently replicated, the exact time of the decay would be fully determined. If they could be consistently set, then 20 particles all with the same hidden variable states would all decay at once.
MWI is also fully deterministic, but says only that the wave function evolves according to Schrodinger's equation. All solutions to this equations are valid, which means that the particle in question decays at all possible time intervals, each in a 'different world'.
Under Bohm, Laplace's demon could predict future states if it had access to these hidden variables.
Under MWI, Laplace's demon could not predict a future state of anything since all possibilities are equally real.
Many other valid interpretations have true randomness going on (God 'rolling dice' as Einstein put it), meaning the demon cannot predict at all.
You know, Searle got into some trouble a while back, he was harassing the female grad students. A lot of other Berkeley philosophers knew about it and looked the other way because Searle is a Great Man and brings great prestige to the department. Caused quite a stir a while back. He had his emeritus status revoked. So goes academic politics.
Quoting noAxioms
Good, maybe I didn't misremember that.
Quoting noAxioms
As I recall it, Searle said it's a great mystery why his arm goes up after he wills it to. So that's the opposite. How does Searle say it goes up in the TED transcript?
Quoting noAxioms
Yes I can see that. When Xi Jinping speaks Chinese, he understands Chinese. When the Chinese room speaks Chinese, it doesn't. I can see why people throw rocks at Searle's argumen. When you state it that way, it's hard to defend.
Quoting noAxioms
Searle doesn't appear to know much about computation, and certainly didn't when he first made the Chinese room argument. To be fair, nobody did back then. But his room operates by a big set of deterministic rules, so I assume he would mean computability if he had known about it back then.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes thanks. We both want this shorter and both collude to make it longer.
Quoting noAxioms
Because I can't believe that a computer program of any complexity, running at any speed, could ever be conscious. Euclid's algorithm computes the least common divisor of two integers. I can't imagine that running it fast enough would suddenly make it care.
I reject many of the common arguments. "Brains are made of neurons and graphs with weighted nodes are just like brains with neurons." Rejected. The nervous system is much more complex than that, and we don't know how it works. "We process information, computers process information, same difference." Rejected. Equivocating information processing. "Programs exhibit emergent behavior (I accept that) and consciousness is an emergent behavior." Rejected, because consciousness is not a behavior.
I see so much specious logic among the cognitive cognoscenti. (I just made up that phrase!) The bigger the intellectual cele
brity, the more vapid the logic outside their field of professional competence. George Smoot again. Great cosmologist. Lousy philosopher.
Quoting noAxioms
Simulation as approximation. I can simulate gravity, I can simulate a brain. Not same as creating consciousness.
Quoting noAxioms
Programs play chess and drive cars, and I'm duly impressed. Not same as being conscious.
I didn't say that certain aspects of human behavior can't be simulated. The chess programs are far better than the best human players these days. I know that. Desn't alter my point. Only makes it harder to defend :-)
Quoting noAxioms
What is a simulated consciousness? As in an approximated or artificial consciousness. If we could make a conscious machine, I'd be amazed, but many believe they are working on it.
Quoting noAxioms
I have arguments, not evidence. What would constitute evidence of what might be possible in the future? The ultimate argument against my position is that some configurations of atoms are self-aware, and someday we may figure out what those configurations are. I have no counterargument. I'm afraid it might be true. In the end maybe I'm just a geocentrist threatened by the revelations of Copernicus and Galileo.
Quoting noAxioms
[i]For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.{i] -- Colossians 1:15-17. Sim theory is theology. Christian theology at that.
Quoting noAxioms
My misunderstanding. This referred to the claim that everything physical is computational. If you agree with me that you don't assert this, then we're in complete agreement. In fact I think we might be in a lot of agreement in general.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't think I've denied that. You are correct. I have an opinion. No evidence.
Quoting noAxioms
I have my beliefs, but I could be wrong.
Perhaps there is something about life. We don't know what life is. Why do some arrangements of atoms become alive? And when we die, we're the same atoms. Soul, life energy. Consciousness is connected to those things. Programs don't have souls, don't have life energy, aren't alive.
Quoting noAxioms
You are completely agreeing with me I think.
Quoting noAxioms
I think we're pretty much in agreement on everything by now. Except Bostrom's meaning of simulation.
Quoting noAxioms
Of course. Agreed. But "works" is relative. Like dark matter. Our theory of gravity works, but we know it's not quite right.
Quoting noAxioms
I already agree.
Quoting noAxioms
Well just about anything can be approximated to sufficient precision. I agree with that.
Except for consciousness. And perhaps life. The deep mysteries.
Quoting noAxioms
Not sure I recall the def.
Quoting noAxioms
Right. But the universe does it anyway. How does the universe know exactly how things will work, and not just approximately? Well, I don't know. I suspect it might not be computational. We should at least consider the possibility.
Quoting noAxioms
Oh no, that's chaos theory. Even if we had all the details of the initial state, we can't necessarily predict the future. Tiny rounding errors add up to great differences in output. Nearby points in the initial state space lead to vastly different outcomes. We know this. Even totally deterministic systems can't be arbitrarily predicted.
Quoting noAxioms
Is that right? Forgive my astronomy error. It doesn't invalidate the point I was trying to make.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. I better go watch some more Sabine, she's very good on dark matter and MOND.
Another good point about the ancestor simulations. How do they handle chaos? Slight differences in initial conditions plus rounding errors in the hardware (assumed digital, so essentially like our own computers, just more powerful).
Quoting noAxioms
Well you've motivated me to slog through some more. But this does actually answer a question I've had for a long time. I wasn't sure if Bostrom just meant our experiences are simulated (like an immersive video game) versus our minds actually being created in the computer. He means the latter, explicitly.
Quoting noAxioms
Not to me before I finally read it closely enough.
Quoting noAxioms
That's exactly what he does suggest! He says that in the future, computations will instantiate consciousness.
Quoting noAxioms
Oh my ... not sure I know what that means.
Quoting noAxioms
Right. I don't think a Turing machine will ever be conscious. Turing himself made that point. He said (in his 1950 paper on machine intelligence) that we can never know if a machine is conscious. We can only look at behavior, hence his Turing test. We can only observe behavior.
Quoting noAxioms
Very distinct. The universe, or God, instantiates all the stuff around us. It is the stuff around us. It's the exact ultimate laws of the universe. The execution of a model is just that. It lets us predict, to sufficient accuracy, how the galaxies will move. It doesn't move the galaxies and it's not exact.
God or whatever creates gravity. We can make computer simulations of gravity by executing programs that implement abstract (ie approximate or incomplete) models of gravity.
To me the distinction is clear. Instantiation is the territory. Execution of a model is the map. The map is not the territory.
Quoting noAxioms
They are not. The simulation can spit out a number that tells you how fast the bowling balls would move towards each other if they were real. But there aren't any bowling balls being moved. Only a computer model.
Quoting noAxioms
Nothing to do with precision. Gravity simulations do not attract nearby bowling balls. They do not instantiate gravity.
Does that help with the distinction? We can simulate gravity but we can't instantiate it. It's already been instantiated by causes that we can't fathom. I hear that mass is the binding energy inside the quarks, and that mass distorts spacetime; but that doesn't actually tell us how it all came to be.
Oh dear this got long again.
Such arguments seem to turn on our current level of computing power, and how, given some hypothetical growth rate of such powers, at some point in the future we'll be able to run ancestor simulations. But if this is indeed a simulation, then anything we purport to know about our present levels of technology (and thus any extrapolation therefrom) is illusory, because we don't actually possess that technology: such technology is simulated.
No doubt these types of questions have been answered, as Bostrom's probably a pretty smart fellow, it's just something that niggles at me when I hear discussion about simulations.
Yes, there's an implicit assumption in Bostrom's argument that the simulation we're in is similar to "the real world".
Maybe because the real world might have a lot in common with a simulated world? It seems a bit ad hoc to me.
Take airplanes. If the simulation initial state was set in the 20th century, then it includes airplane technology. It is 'given' so to speak. If the initial state is started before that, then airplanes are our own invention.. Either way, we possess the technology. It isn't illusory. We actually can make airplanes that fly. If you crash in one, you really die, as opposed to say a video game where if you 'die', you simply exit the game. Getting shot in a video game is indeed an illusion.
Quoting Arkady
@RogueAI correctly pointed out that only somebody who knows about humans would want to simulate them, so it is presumably our decedents, be they human anymore or not.
The initial state would presumably resemble some factual state in the past of 'reality', as best they can estimate it, but it would subsequently evolve in a totally different path, regardless of what you define the term 'ancestor simulation' to mean. You're indeed not the first to bring this up.
So why would they want to run such a simulation? It won't reproduce 'what really happened', so there must be some other reason to simulate an entire planet at the level of full consciousness. I can't think of one. Not with those requirements.
Quoting fishfry
"we know the basic part of the answer and that is, there are sequences of neuron firings and they terminate where the acetylcholine is secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons, sorry to use philosophical terminology here. But when it is secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons, a whole lot of wonderful things happen in the ion channels and the damned arm goes up."
That's a wordy version of what I said, which is "there's wires connecting the parts where the will is implemented, to the parts where the motor control is implemented". Under Chalmers, there isn't such a wire, hence the magic.
Nobody ever said the program was conscious. It's dumb as rocks, implementing a fairly small program that simply knows how to move the particles around. It implements physics and is no more conscious than is physical law. It has no external input, so right there it doesn't qualify as being conscious. Some programs do have such input, but not most simulations.
Anyway, you don't believe a simulated person could be conscious, so you make up an arbitrary rule that forbids it. I think that's what you're saying, but personal belief isn't evidence against somebody's hypothesis. It's only an irrational reason that you don't accept the hypothesis.
I say the car wouldn't be able to do its thing if it wasn't conscious of what's going on around it. Not the same as human consciousness, sure, but it's still a form of consciousness. A car stays conscious even when it's off, a sort of security feature that has caught vandals and thiefs.
So maybe you have more of a Searle definition of 'conscious' which is 'only if a genuine human is doing it'. He actually defines the word early in his talk, but it's just 'awake' as opposed to 'asleep', something that regularly comes and goes with a human.
Mathematics. Known physical limits. Psychology. Fermi paradox. All vague things, I admit, but at least not empty.
The computer doesn't need to know which configurations. It only has to simulate physical law. It means that if they successfully simulate a conscious being, they still won't know how consciousness works.
Both the physics community and I are in general agreement in that our physics does not appear to be computational. Bell's theorem even 'proves' this, but it is based on empirical evidence, and one has to accept empirical evidence for the proof to hold.
OK, but naturalism is in contrast with concepts like souls, life energy, vitalism, etc. None of these things is necessary to be alive, and indeed, a running program is no more alive than is your brain processes.
They do have a hard time defining 'life'. I mean, given one example of Earth life, it's pretty easy: Anything that trances its ancestry to the earliest life form. But that definition fails as a metric to decide if something alien is alive or not.
It's 'right' enough to know where the moon will be 17 years from now, but the physics is chaotic enough that we don't know where it will be 17 millennia from now.
Indeed, but we can for a limited time. For the rolling lumpy rock, yes, that's a chaotic function, but with sufficient precision, we can predict its brief path until it stops, with arbitrary precision. Same with the weather. Our current precision gets us maybe 6 days of what that storm will do, and much of that error is due to lack of perfect model, and lack of detailed initial state.
Which is exactly why there's no point in doing an ancestor simulation. It will show an alternate history that bears little resemblance to what the books say. If started far enough back, it will not evolve humans.
That's very different than us being a program.
It is "I am a human" vs "I am that on which the laws of physics supervene". The program can't be conscious because it has zero sensory input. It has nothing to be conscious of.
This is Searle's language game again. Instantiation if an anthropomorphic god does it, and 'execution of a model' if anything else does the exact same thing. The model may be a map, but the execution of it is territory.
Nonsense. If they didn't instantiate gravity, then the simulated moon would not orbit the simulated Earth. That's what you defined instantiation to be. Are we changing the definition now of 'instantiation' to be 'not simulated'?
My reply is half the size of your post, in an effort to stem the tendency to growth.
Where is the will that initiates the process?
Quoting noAxioms
You are agreeing with me again?
Quoting noAxioms
I made no rules. I expressed an opinion.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. My reasons are irrational.
You sound like I said something that annoyed you.
Thanks for keeping this brief, anyway. I didn't understand much of this particular post. The rest of this convo has been interesting.
If we're in a simulation, and we make airplanes within the confines of this simulation, then it seems to me that we don't actually possess the technology. We at most possess a simulation of that technology. If we're in a simulation, what does "actually" flying mean? We're merely simulating the flying experience, making it simply a hyper-advanced flight sim. Pilots in flight sims aren't actually flying, after all.
I think that's the whole point of a simulation: nothing is actual, since it's by hypothesis simulated. If we're to posit that "simulated" = "real", then what work is the "simulated" descriptor doing?
Quoting noAxioms
Well, it's a truism that only beings who know about humans would want to simulate them, as in order to simulate something you must have knowledge of it, else how do you construct a verisimilitudinous simulation of it? However, that truism needn't limit the simulators to our descendants: perhaps they're advanced aliens which at some point in cosmic history made contact with humans, perhaps they're advanced AI like in the Matrix, and so forth.
So in the simulation hypothesis, everything in our universe is as real as we are, and therefore it is meaningful for them to say that they actually fly. From the point of view of those running the simulation (if they're paying any attention to it at all), they might say that the simulation is simulating the flying of some of the simulated people, but that seems a needlessly wordy way to put it.
The Matrix is also an example of a VR, not an example of the simulation hypothesis.
Aliens (or our robot successors) might indeed be running the simulation, but the simulated history (especially an initial state) would then likely not bear much resemblance to actual history.
The robots would have perhaps some DNA evidence of mythical humans, and to demonstrate that humans might have been responsible for the genesis of the earliest machines, they run simulations of human evolution from primitive state to eventually creating their successors. They'd probably have to run it thousands of times to get one where it works before we go extinct.
I have no idea how something robot/alien could create an initial state if they don't have a real human to copy. Perhaps they grow one from the DNA, and then populate their sim with what they learn from that.
Quoting fishfryI can't answer for your view, but for the naturalists, it comes from different places, depending on what sort of thing is wanted.
Most will comes from subconscious places (Limbic system), such as choices as to which way to swerve around the tree or to cheat on your spouse. But the will to choose option C in a multiple choice test comes from higher up (Cerebrum for instance).
I said that because the reasons seem backwards: Conclusion first, then selection of premises to support that conclusion. This is rationalization, something humans are very good at. I don't consider humans (myself included) to be very rational creatures.
Not at all, but I apologize if my words annoyed you. The effect was not intentional.
I have no limbic system. Only a simulation of a limbic system in a computer, if I understand you correctly (clearly I don't, right?) A computer simulation of a limbic system cannot create emotions any more than a simulation of gravity attracts nearby bowling balls.
Quoting noAxioms
I agree with you there. We all have prejudices that make us gravitate towards one pole or the other of unanswerable questions.
Quoting noAxioms
Well I confess that I have no proof for my opinions or biases.
You sound like Arkady, but no, that statement is misleading. It makes it sound like the limbic system is simulated but you are not. So either "I have a limbic system", or "The simulated 'I' has a simulated limbic system". Either of those wordings is at least consistent. Your opinion (and mine, but for very different reasons) of course is that neither you nor your limbic system are the product of a simulation.
Nobody is claiming that a simulation of X creates an X in the simulating world, which is the strawman you seem to use in your gravity example every time where you deny an equivalent straw claim that simulation of gravity would create gravity in the GS world. That you persist in this suggestion means that yes, you're not getting it right, perhaps deliberately so.
So no, a simulation in the GS world of a limbic system does not create emotion in the GS world. I agree with that. It is exactly for that reason that the program running the simulation isn't conscious.
I don't read this thread, I only respond to my mentions. So I have no idea what @Arkady may have said. If I sound like him he must be an individual of deep insight and wisdom :-)
Quoting noAxioms
I asked where will comes from. Intensionality. Caring. Feelings. We know from biology that feelings come from the limbic system. But if I'm simulated, so is my limbic system. Raising the question once again of how a computer program can have feeeelings, nothing more than feeeeelings.
Quoting noAxioms
Well I agree with that.
Quoting noAxioms
That's exactly what's claimed.
Quoting noAxioms
Just pointing out that computer simulations of gravity don't attract bowling balls (clearly true) and that therefore simulations of brains do not necessarily implement minds.
Quoting noAxioms
No hope for me, clearly, after all this time.
Quoting noAxioms
Oh, I have bad will. But even so, you admit I have will! Therefore I am NOT likely to be a computer simulation. I will, therefore I am. Or as the song goes ... if it weren't for bad will, I wouldn't have no will at all.
But really. After all this you have to accuse me of bad will? How am I supposed to take that?
Quoting noAxioms
So you agree with me after all. Or at least, I agree with what you wrote here. A program isn't conscious, it does not implement or instantiate consciousness, and it does not "simulate" consciousness. Consciousness is not the kind of thing that can be simulated, unless you think chatbots simulate consciousness. Many people believe that these days.
Deliberately not getting it right. No. False. I'm not trolling you to annoy you. Why did you say that?
Not minds/people in the GS world, no. The claim is that we (the simulated people with yes, simulated minds) are in this simulated universe, and not in the universe running the simulation.
A simulation of a person without will would be a simulation of a body in a vegitative state.
What, my saying 'deliberate'? You seem to be putting words in people's mouths that they didn't say, and I don't find you to be an ignorant person.
Not the simulation being discussed here, correct. A running computer process forever without inputs by definition cannot be conscious any more than you would be without inputs ever.
I have a very loose definition that you would not like, but my opinion there is irrelevant. The chatbots (which perhaps imitate, but not simulate anything) at least have input, but so does a thermostat. The simulation in question does not.
The voices in my head. Put there by our Simulator who art in heaven.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, we're characters in a video game, with the assumption that Ms Pac-Man has an inner life. I believe I rejected that assumption a while back.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't see that. Isn't a simulation of a person without a will exactly what they call a philosophical zombie? It would literally be a terrific chatbot operating inside a highly realistic flesh and bone bot. Your neighbor, for instance. What makes you think they have a will?
Quoting noAxioms
Perhaps I over reacted.
Quoting noAxioms
Hmm. That raises some questions. The simulation program has no input. You write the code, then you execute the code and it does what it does.
What is its output? How exactly do the Simulators examine its inner life? In other words, they run the program, and inside the program I come into existence. Me with my subjective experience. (How does that happen? Remind me please). Clearly they are interested in what I'm thinking and experiencing ... or are they only interested in my actions? So two questions:
1) Do the simulators have access to my internal mental states, and if so, how? Copious log files of everything I'm thinking? and
2) How do I perform actions for the Simulators to watch? They're running ancestor simulations, so they must want to see what I'm going to do next. How do they "watch" me? What are the outputs?
Quoting noAxioms
You are avoiding the question of whether the sims are self-aware? I didn't understand this remark.
That's what a simulation is, yes. It has an initial state conveyed to it, and that is input of sorts, but once the simulation begins, there is no further input of any kind. If there was, it ceases to be a simulation. I've run plenty of these myself. It was my job for a while. The sims would run without any I/O at all for perhaps a week, and I don't think results were available until the end, but they could be reported as they happen.
Output (state of system at any given time) can be had any time, often at the end, but it doesn't have to be. A weather sim is a single simulation of a storm, and it could output the stats of the storm at regular intervals, or it could wait until the end and output the whole thing in a lump. It has to complete in hours, not days, to be useful. My chip sims were a little difference since each chip was run through a series of discreet tests, mostly designed to see how fast you could clock it before it started misbehaving, but also to check the design for bugs. Those sims still output everything at the end, but they didn't have to.
They don't. It makes no more sense than asking what it is like for a human to be a bat.
Same way it happens in the real (materialist) world: Particles interact and do their thing. Your experience is a function of matter interactions (not so according to someone like Chalmers, whom you referenced with the p-zombie mention above).
The simulation itself cares about what you're thinking, but only because it needs to change physics due to it. The runners of the simulation may or may not care. Certainly they don't have enough people to care about every single individual. It's an ancestor simulation of the whole human race. They perhaps want to see what history unfolds, and they care no more about what anybody is thinking than you do about what anybody is thinking. You only care about what they say to you, what they do. You may wonder what goes on inside, but that's a motive for a single-person simulation, not a planetary scale one.
If 'the simulators' are those that put together the simulation, who want the ancestor sim, then they have perhaps access to the same data as we do with a pimped-out MRI scan: A picture of where the matter is. You're not getting thoughts from that. To log thoughts, something needs to interpret that matter state and render it into language for readable by the simulators. I suppose such log files are possible, but much of thoughts are not in language form.
And per above, if this is the sort of detail one wants, it makes far more sense to simulate one or a very small number of people. So the motives are probably different for the ancestor sim.
Up to them to design a way to do it that is useful for their purposes. I suppose one could insert a sort of point of view interface that lets one look from any event anywhere (much like the little guy you can steer around in google maps), and lets it move at the observers control. The sim would need to save all state (and not just current state) for this to work since it probably wouldn't be useful if it was 'live', displaying only what constitutes the current state of the sim.
I presume that 'the sims' are the humans in the simulation.
The hypothesis is that the sims are us, so tautologically they're as self-aware as you are.
If 'the sims' is a reference to the simulation software, program, or process, well that's a different answer since people are not hypothesized to be any of those things.
So the humans are entities created by the software? Then how are they not real people and not simulations of anything?
Quoting noAxioms
Quite so. But my experience is real experience, not a simulation of experience. So the people "inside" your software are real people.
They are (hypothesized as being) you, and you are real, per your definition:
Quoting Ludwig V
You seem to be inconsistent with your usage of 'real'. Have you switched to a different definition?
It's not my software. It's the software of the entities running the simulation, which isn't me. I am hypothesized to be the product of that simulation, not hypothesized to be creating or running one.
Some possibilities:
they don't want us to know
it's merely entertainment for them
they don't realize we're conscious, they think of it as more like a 3D film
the do give us guidance, but not a lot - perhaps the voices prophets hear, perhaps insights people get regarding morals or science or whatever.
Perhaps it's a work of art and the whole idea is to let it run itself.
Perhaps it is in an experiment and there are experiments where they interfere and where they don't
Then:
how the heck would we know the motives of creatures other than us and that advanced
Quoting jasonmNo instances of anomalies? There are often anomalies. Perhaps in the end they will be explained, perhaps not. In any case, we now explain away anomalies even if we really don't know.
But again, you're making assumptions. Perhaps they don't want anomalies in their experiment, entertainment, artwork, whatever this is to them. It matters to them. And since they're making it.....Quoting jasonmWe wouldn't know how big the universe is. We only know what we know about our universe, which would be simulated. Whatever is outside it in which it is running would be beyond our ken. I'm sure educated, medieval people would dismiss descriptions of things we can do now as being impossible. But what did they know about humans would later be able to do? What do we know?
As far as Occam's Razor....
Probability and Indifference: Bostrom's simulation argument doesn't posit that the simulation hypothesis is necessarily simpler or more straightforward than the idea that we live in a base reality. Instead, it suggests that given certain plausible assumptions about the future capabilities of civilizations, the probability that we are in a simulation might be high. The argument hinges on three propositions:
The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (capable of running simulations) is very close to zero.
The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor simulations is very close to zero.
The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.
If the first two propositions are false, then the third proposition must be true, meaning we are almost certainly in a simulation.
Reframing Occams Razor: Bostrom might argue that Occam's Razor should be applied to the assumptions underpinning each hypothesis. The simulation hypothesis, when considered in the context of his argument, doesnt necessarily introduce more assumptions than the assumption that we live in the one base reality, especially given the potential vastness of simulated realities versus a single base reality.
Technological Plausibility: Bostrom might point out that the simulation hypothesis stems from an extrapolation of known technological trends. Given the rapid advancement in computing and virtual reality, the assumption that future civilizations will have the capability and possibly the desire to run detailed simulations is not implausible. Thus, it is not an extraordinary leap in assumption.
The Simulation Arguments Structure: Bostroms argument is structured to show that at least one of the three propositions must be true, making it a probabilistic argument rather than one based solely on the principle of simplicity. The argument demonstrates that if advanced civilizations are likely and interested in running simulations, it becomes statistically more probable that we are in a simulation.
Not Claiming Proof: Bostrom doesnt claim that the simulation hypothesis is definitively true; rather, he argues that it is a hypothesis that should be taken seriously given the logical structure of his argument. He acknowledges that the base reality hypothesis is simpler in some ways but insists that the simulation hypothesis has significant probabilistic support under certain assumptions.
I'm coming to the end here. My interest in this topic is far exceeded by my word count at this point. At one point I thought I understood the sim/VR distinction. But once I found out that Bostrom explicitly assumes that the simulation implements consciousness, the distinction becomes moot.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, no input.
Quoting noAxioms
You did not answer the question. Can you see that?
What is the output? I did not ask WHEN is the output. I asked WHAT is the output.
Quoting noAxioms
So the sims have an inner life (one of Bostrom's hidden assumptions) but the simuilators have no knowledge of it? You are really out on a limb. They care out their ancestor sims act but not what they think and feel, even though (somehow) they managed to make them think and feel?
Quoting noAxioms
So YOU know how consciousness works. Why do you bother even trying to communicated with one so ignorant as me, who doesn't think ANYONE knows that?
Quoting noAxioms
So step one, they figure out how to implement consciousness using computers; and step two, they entirely ignore that and focus on behavior.
And again, how is that behavior communicated to them? What is the output? What is the output? Ask yourself if anything you're saying makes sense?
Quoting noAxioms
An MRI does not provide access to internal mental states. You know that.
Quoting noAxioms
You're just speculating about your own confused ideas. You are not making sense. Perhaps we're at a point of putting this convo to rest. Bostrom says the computers implement consciousness. And I am asking you, what are the outputs of the simulation?
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. I'm asking you question you can't answer. And instead of saying, "You know, you have a bit of a point there," you're just making stuff up. And I'm getting a bit annoyed. Granted I annoy easily sometimes but this is one of those times.
Quoting noAxioms
The sims are programs. What are their outputs (he asked again).
Quoting noAxioms
That is exactly what Bostrom is hypothesizing!
Could we agree to disagree? Could you accept that you can't answer any of these questions except by making stuff up? This has been an interesting convo but this last post did not have any content IMO. Just handwaving about questions you can't answer. I don't want to leave in a huff, but I might have to leave in a minute and a huff, as Groucho said.
We can only speculate as to the purpose of running this kind of simulation, and thenature of the output depends on that purpose. Maybe it is a sort of detailed history book. Maybe it is pictures. Maybe it's just a stored database. Maybe the purpose is simply to see how long humanity lasts until it goes extinct, in which case a simple number might be the output.
I did mention the nature of the output later in the post above, such as the example of the output of google maps for instance, a very useful interface for display of simulation results.
You define 'the sims' below to be the programs in the GS world. I see no assertion that either a program (a static chunk of software on perhaps a disk somewhere) or a computer process (the execution of said program on some capable device) with no inputs would have what you might consider to be an 'inner life'. Bostrom doesn't say this, and neither do I.
They have knowledge of it in the same way that I have knowledge of my wife having an inner life. If that's going out on a limb, then one is presuming solipsism. But my presumption of my wife having inner life does not let me know what it's like to be her.
The simulation can report what each person thinks and feels. The simulation has to have access to this because physics is dependent on what people are thinking. So it can report that Bob at time X is paying attention to his laser experiment and is feeling frustrated that he cannot get the setup just right, and his bladder is getting full. It can show his point of view if that helps. Make up your story. What interface tech exists for them is speculation on our part. Humans are notoriously bad at predicting 'future'/higher tech.
I put 'future' in scare quote because maybe the simulation is being run in the year we call 1224 or something. Maybe in the GS world, advancements came much sooner, and in our simulated world, things happened much slower, and we're far behind them despite 8 more centuries to learn. If that is the case, the Gregorian calendar is only meaningful in our world, and they number their years differently.
Geez, another strawman. I make no such claim. Bostrom presumes that consciousness is physical/computational. That assumption is no more an explanation of how consciousness works than is the non-explanation by anybody else.
I didn't say they figured out how consciousness works, nor did I say they focus only on behavior. The simulation needs to know what each persons mental focus is, what his intent is, because physics as he describes it depends on it. One doesn't need to know how consciousness works to do this.
There's no 'them' to communicate to. OK, observers in the GS world can watch, (very similar to the google map interface), but they don't affect anything since that would constitute external input. The running of any sim doesn't require observation of any kind, but why run it if nobody's going to pay attention to the outcome? Yet again, the output is dependent on the purpose of running the thing, and we can only speculate on the purpose.
A full classical scan of a person provides access to internal physical states, and that's all that's needed to simulate the person, per naturalism. But such a simple simulation would not have physics supervening on mental states like the sim Bostrom proposes, so the one he speculates is far more complicated and requires access to mental states, not just physical states.
Yes, with that quote, I was. I don't know the purpose of the sim, and I don't know what tech is available to the entities running the sim, so I can only speculate as to how they would choose to 'observe' it.
Ah, not us, but the program in the GS world. Apologies for getting that wrong. Sims then typically not conscious, especially since it typically lacks input.
Me saying what the output would be is definitely making stuff up. Me knowing what a simulation is and how it typically works is not making stuff up, since I did it regularly.
Our opinions definitely differ, but I'm trying not to assert opinions. I'm trying to interpret what Bostrom's opinion is, and how he attempts to back it.
Ok, I'll concede that the sim program has some kind of graphic output that lets the simulators watch the ancestor simulation in action.
BTW Google maps is not a simulation, it's a Geographic Information System. And it takes inputs, such as the zoom and recenter operations from the user.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, what else could we be talking about? Bostrom: "Are YOU living in a computer simulation?" My emphasis. Me. You. Each of us. We are a program being run by the simulators. What else do you think he's talking about? The simulators run programs that that are us, in some magic way.
Quoting noAxioms
Process. Executing program. If I said program, I should have written process, or executing program. I actually kind of doubt I said this, but if I said program and not executing program, I meant executing program.
What on earth else do you think Bostrom means? Are you living in a computer simulation? What else can he mean?
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Agreed, to a point. It's odd that Bostrom thinks the computers instantiate self-awareness in the sims, yet show little interest in it. Well it's a small point, virtually nothing in Bostrom's thesis holds up anyway.
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Bostrom clearly thinks the simulators live in (our) future and we are simulations of their ancestors. Though of course you're right, there's no reason that would be true. Maybe we're the Jetsons and not the Flintstones.
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Ok.
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Bostrom says that. That's the one great revelation I had from this thread. Bostrom explicitly states that the sims are self-aware, and blithely justified is as "it's widely believed."
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Ok.
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Of course they are watching, they are running an ancestor simulation. Of course I have no idea why Bostrom chose that particular reason, since with all our impressive computing power, WE don't run ancestor simulations. Maybe we're their pr0n hub. They like to watch us mate. That's more likely than that the history majors are running ancestor simulations.
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Right. You can map all the neurons and you would not know what someone's thinking. Although impressive work in that direction is being done by the cogsci crowd, so I could be proven wrong soon enough.
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Ok. I'll concede that they have a graphic or numeric output that can be observed. And they can talk about their mental states, as we often do. "I think I'm hungry."
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ARGHHHHHH! The sims are conscious. That's on page one of Bostrom's paper. We are the sims. After all this, are we not at least agreed on this?
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Ok.
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That's the funny thing. You have said you don't agree w/Bostrom. And for some reason, that makes you want to put great effort into explaining his wrong position to me.
One more thing: Last night, you said: "If 'the sims' is a reference to the simulation software, program, or process, well that's a different answer since people are not hypothesized to be any of those things."
Have you retracted that yet? It's Bostrom's thesis that people ARE hypothesized to be those things. "Are you living in a computer simulation." Bostrom speculates that WE are sims.
Surely we agree on that, at least, yes? No?
No, but it has an interface which is the beginnings of what one might look like for viewing simulation states. Yes, the controls to the tool constitute input to the tool, but since viewing simulation results has zero effect on the simulation itself, it doesn't count as input to the simulation, only input to one of many read-only tools to view the data produced by the simulation.
Google maps can only show you specific places. You can go into a few select buildings, but your view is mostly confined to streets. With the simulation, there is no restriction of views only where the van was, taking a picture every 10 meters or so. You can go inside walls and watch the rats eat the wiring if you want, even if it's totally dark in there.
I thought they were the people, not the programs.
But you defined it earlier to mean 'the simulation processes", of which there may be many running at once, each simulating a different world.
Note: You yet again redefine 'sims' to be the people below. Using the word in both ways is the source of so much of our disconnect.
'Living in a computer simulation" is different from being that computer simulation. The two exist in different worlds. They're not the same thing. The simulation runs in the GS world. We exist in this (simulated) world. That's the distinction I've been trying to stress. I'd try to use your meaning, but all sorts of strawman conclusions can be drawn when one equates the two very distinct things, such as "the simulation program is conscious'" which it isn't even though you and I are. Simulation programs tend to be very simple, endlessly running the same relatively small list of instructions again and again over a relatively large data set.
I know. It is still a mistake to say you are an executing program, for the reasons stated just above and in prior posts.
Presuming 'sims' is the people with this comment, else it makes no sense.
It's a very weak point in his argument in my opinion, so he avoids it. To run a good ancestor simulation like this, it would require far less resources to have a good AI imitate (rather than simulate) each of the people. We're talking about something far better than passing a Turing test since each person needs to not just type like a human, but to act and defecate and bleed like a human. Now your ancestor sim can go on at perhaps a thousandth of the resources needed to do it at the level of simulation of consciousness of each person. But his hypothesis requires this, so he's forced to posit this implausible way of achieving the goal he's made up. The ratio is likely waaaay more than 1000-1.
He tries to address this by waving away my '1/1000th' guess with 'we don't know the real number'. He calls the imitation people (as opposed to fully simulated ones) 'shadow people', and discounts this strategy, and yet gives every simulated person a shadow body and populates the world with shadow animals and plants and such, none of which is actually simulated like the brains are. Go figure.
The initial state of the sim had perhaps some real ancestors (depends what date they selected), but we (the descendants of those initial people) are not in any way their ancestors, and thus the simulators are not in our future, only the future of some past year they selected for their initial state.
Yes, I agree with you that Bostrom seems to imply that history would play out more or less the same, in which case he's just fooling himself, or, if there's a script, it's not a simulation at all, but just a CG effect for a movie script, which doesn't involve people that need to make their own choices.
And I buy that. Yes, the simulated people (and not the simulation processes) are self aware. But he doesn't explicitly say that anybody knows how 'consciousness works'. You don't have to. You put matter together like this, and the thing is conscious. That's what the sim does. It just moves matter. It doesn't need to know how the emergent effects work.
Agree. Or the biologists, which is a history major of sorts. What will they get from a sim that starts at a state resembling some past state, but evolves in a completely different direction? Not much. What if you run a thousand of them, all with different outcomes. Now you have statistics, and that's useful. Output would look like a history book. 'Watching' specific events from a selected point of view probably won't be too useful for that, but such a view would be useful to find the initial cause of some avoidable calamity (like a war) which helps our future people know what to look for to prevent their own calamities.
Point is, that's a good starting point to resolve the 'why would such a sim be run'? I also still say that imitation, not full simulation, would be a far less costly way to achieve any of the goals mentioned. Only Bostrom requires it, but he can't force the 'future' people to do it an inefficient way.
But they kind of already do. They can put a thing on your head, measuring only external EM effects on your scalp (like an EEG) and they can see you make a decision before you're aware of it yourself. Point is, one doesn't need to know 'how consciousness works' in order to gean what the sim needs, which is mostly focus and intent. What is our guy paying attention to? Why? The sim needs to know because the physics of that thing is dependent on it., It changes from when nobody is paying attention to it. This is done for optimization purposes, and for faking non-classical effects in a classical simulation.
Quoting fishfry
Quoting fishfryAaand the definition changes again. You said the sims are the programs. The programs are processes running in the GS world. We are humans living in this simulated world. Maybe we should stop using 'sims' as shorthand for this ever moving target.
Be explicit. Use either 'simulated people' (us) or simulation process (the program running in a different world).
Bostrom does not use the word 'sims', so it isn't on any page of his paper.
He says on page 1 (the only reference to 'conscious' on that page): "Suppose that these simulated people are conscious". He is proposing that the people in the simulated world, and not the program running in the simulating 'future' world, is what is conscious. This is consistent with what I've been saying.
He goes on later to presume substrate independence, which is that consciousness is not necessarily confined to carbon based biological forms. But the simualted people in his proposal are based on simulated carbon-based simulated biological forms. But he must say this to emphasize the standard objection that by definition, no computer can instantiate something conscious.
Nowhere does he state that something as simple as a simulation process is itself conscious.
Yea, that's right. There's indeed not much point in this since your personal beliefs conflict, so you won't consider it on its own grounds.
You keep changing what 'the sims' means, and Bostrom doesn't use the word, so I cannot say yes or no.
Bostrom does indeed speculate that it is more likely than not that we are simulated people: that we are composed of simulated matter being manipulated by a simulation process running in some other world. He nowhere speculates that we are that simulation process itself.
I'm satisfied on the output or interface aspect. The output could be anything, they could watch us on 3D holograms or a VR headset. It could even be immersive. They could even BE us for a while, as in the movie Being John Malkovich.
But I didn't mean to get hung up on the question. Of course the programs (running processes, sorry!) would generate output. They'd have user-visible output, as with our software, as well as internal visibility in terms of the simulators being able to see the state of their computation at any moment, just as we can.
I think we are agreeing, though, that the internal mental states of the sims -- that is, the thoughts and feelings and experiences of humans such as you and I -- are as opaque to our simulators, as they are to us! So in the end, we are a great mystery to our simulators. They probably watch the stuff we humans do and go Wow, that doesn't make ANY sense!
So the simulators can't read our minds. That means they don't have control over us. They really do not know what we'll do.
They're like a God who gives us free will, just to see if we'll choose the righteous path.
Once again, simulation theory is more like theological speculation than science.
But you know, let's note this as an open Bostrom question. Can the simulators read our minds or not? Are we a surprise to them? Or can their computer scientists just look at the code and figure out what we'll do? In which case they could ... simulate the sim, could they not.
So: Does Bostrom think the simulators can read our minds? And do we have free will? LOL same old theological questions, but I wonder if Bostrom addressed this.
Quoting noAxioms
You could never have a 100% perfect geographical simulation. It must have a resolution, and reality is always more fine grained. You could zoom to the houses but not the pebbles in the garden or the ants in the grass. Or whatever. I don't follow why you would claim that there is "no restriction of views," of course any geographic database has a resolution far short of reality. How can you watch the rats if there's no light? Visual recording devices require light, that's a basic principle of physics. I think this paragraph confused me.
Quoting noAxioms
Minor terminology issues. Sorry if confusion. A program is a written list of computer instructions, stored on a hard drive or static memory device of the future. It's like a recipe in your recipe drawer. It can be used to make a cake, but only if someone executes the instructions. By itself, a program does nothing.
A process is an executing program. This is standard terminology.
The sims are us. I have in the past said the the process (forgive me if I ever said program, I know better) instantiates us. What other word could you use? The execution of the simulation program somehow gives rise to our existence. Our minds and self-awareness, and our bodies and the world around us. The program brings it into existence.
I wonder if Bostrom explains how any of this works? The simulators write a program. They run the program. Somehow, you and I and the world all around us comes into being.
Perhaps you could tell me how that is supposed to happen? If it's true, then where am I right now? I'm an abstract consciousness floating above or around some physical piece of computing hardware. How is this magic trick supposed to work?
What does Bostrom say in his introduction? It's a "quite widely-accepted position in the philosophy of mind." As if that explains anything.
Quoting noAxioms
The sims are the people below. You and I are the sims. I did not realize I've been using confusing terminology, but let me clarify that today.
* Program is the thing the programmers write.
* Process is the executing program. The program is used to control the circuits of a digital computer and cause it to carry out a computation. It's a physical process that requires time, space, and energy, and gives off heat. I may refer to a process as a running program or executing program from time to time.
* The sims are the result of the process, [i]but not in any way ever explicated by anyone[/b]. It's not a principle of computer science that executing programs. You can't find any algorithm that says, "Implement this algorithm and a mind will come into being."
But if, for the sake of argument, I grant you this trick: The sims are the minds that arise out of executing the computation.
I hope the foregoing is clarifying any confusion in my terminology. Let me know if any questions or if I'm missing the point of your concerns entirely. That's possible too.
Quoting noAxioms
Wow. How can you say that? They are identical. We are the simulation. Our lives and our minds and everything around us. We're in the simulation, we ARE the simulation.
Note that by the hypothesis that the executing simulation program (the process) implements consciousness in the sims; it follows that we are not in a Descartes's deceiver situation. We are not minds being fooled by a really good video game running in our VR headsets. Our minds are instantiated by the simulation (the executing program) itself.
So how can you say being the simulation isn't living in the simulation? We ARE the simulation and we LIVE IN the simulation. You and I.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes. We are an artifact, or "emergent property," a phrase I dislike, of a program executing (a process) in the world of the simulator, on computing hardware built and operated by the simulators. And out of that simulation, we arise. How? No matter, I'll stipulate it for sake of argument.
So I don't know what you mean that they're in "two different worlds?" Our world isn't real. It's an ethereal output, or byproduct, or epiphenomenon, of the ancestor simulation program being executed on future but nevertheless physical hardware belonging to the simulators.
Surely all this is clear, isn't it?
So in effect we DO live in the simulators' world. We live in the spirit-space adjacent to their computer.
Is this not one hell of a dualist theory? Where do these minds live?
I think all I'm doing is breaking down Bostrom's ideas and showing how absurd they are. Even if taken on their own terms. Later in this post you say my only objection to Bostrom is the computable mind hypothesis. I hope I have demonstrated that I can grant Bostrom that hypothesis and his idea still sucks.
But if the mind is an artifact of the executing program, then the city I live in is not the city I live in. The year I live in is not the year I live in. The body I live in is not the body I live in. They are all artifacts or "emergent properties" of the executing program. They are not real. It's a brain-in-a-vat experiment. That's what simulation theory comes down to. Even when taken on its own terms.
Quoting noAxioms
I hope I've clarified my thoughts. You haven't convinced me that you've clarified yours :-)
I don't think I ever said that "the simulation program is conscious." I don't actually think I said that. But if I did, I apologize. Once and for all time, this is my statement:
A computation is executed on physical hardware operated by the simulators. As it executes, it instantiates, by some unknown mechanism, a mind. That mind is me.
This is perfectly clear in my mind. I hope it is now perfectly clear in your mind that it is perfectly clear in my mind.
It does leave you or Bostrom with the problem of telling us where these minds all live. Is this essentially a dualistic philosophy, with the minds living in some sort of spiritual realm? Or if they are in the machine, can they be measured by electrical engineers? How is all this supposed to work?
Bostrom says it's a "widely believed position in the theory of mind." I'm struck by his blithe indifference to the issues involved.
Quoting noAxioms
That's not even true. When you run a simulation of the weather or of the early universe or of general relativity, you are doing massive amounts of numeric computation and approximation.
I don't know why you think simulation programs are simple. That's not true.
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I'm a mind somehow instantiated or brought into existence by an executing program. And that raises more questions than it answers. Does it not? But I hope we're in agreement on the terminlogy now.
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Yes, the sims, the imaginary people with little simulated minds that happen to be us.
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I don't see why that would be the case at all. We don't have to waste time trying to define ancestor simulation versus AI. Each sim essentially IS an AI, or there's on AI running all the sims as mutually interacting threads or subprocesses, doesn't matter. Point is that the sims ARE AI's, they have minds, they are sentient.
They are us.
And by the way, what is the moral obligation of the simulators to us? Philosophers and critics of AI are already starting to ask what would be our obligations to any AGIs that we created. Would it be moral to kill or torture them?
By the same token, we can ask why our simulators, who art in Heaven, have cursed us with war, famine, pestilence, and death. If this is all a simulation, why do we suffer and die? Are our simulators historians? Or sadists?
Quoting noAxioms
No they don't. We're all just ethereal beings in a non-physical real of spirit and mind. We are just byproducts of a program executing somewhere. Our bodies are illusions. And worse than Descartes, even our own minds are illusions.
Is Bostrom the world's greatest living nihilist?
But nobody has to pass any Turing test. I assume you're a fellow sentient human because I'm programmed to. To the simulators, you and I are obviously fake as heck. Only we can't see each other's fakeness because the programmers coded us up to accept each other as sentient humans.
Do you see the absurd and nihilistic rabbit hole you fall down once you accept Bostrom's assumptions?
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I don't care about the resource argument. I'll assume the simulators can harness as much energy as they like. Perhaps they've harnessed the cosmic microwave background to power the earth. I don't care what technology they use as long as it conforms to plausible future physics, and Turing's definition of computation. In other words no Halting oracles or "new concepts of computation" allowed in this game.
Quoting noAxioms
Aren't those NPCs? I've always had suspicions about my neighbor. A philosophical zombie for sure.
But again, I'm not concerned with resource constraints. I'll grant Bostrom the computing power to render the entire world as it is, moment-by-moment, to a degree sufficient to seem real to us.
But how real does that even have to be? Maybe everything is in big pixellated blocks, and we are just programmed to think it's all smooth and detailed? It's back to Bishop Berkeley. Since our experience is mediated by our senses, there doesn't need to be anything "out there" at all. Just the program running in the simulators' computer that instantiates our minds.
Nothing is real, man. This is not philosophy, this is a dorm room stoner session.
Quoting noAxioms
So we're being run by people who invented these super-duper computers and mind-instantiating algorithms, but their society has not evolved past, say, the medieval period. You know, that explains a lot! This reminds me of Philip K. Dick in his later years, when he decided that society is an illusion created by ancient people.
Quoting noAxioms
Sure. That's fine. That's possible. But Bostrom claims the opposite. He says, and apologies for frequently returning to this quote: "Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as
they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine?grained and if a certain
quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct).
If you supposed that, you would have an endless cascade of conceptual problems with the technology and the morality and the metaphysics of the idea. Where do these minds live? Do they obey the laws of physics? I think you have stumbled on the only way to make sense of Bostrom's paper. And that is to retract the instantiated mind claim. So there are future humans, and they run ancestor simulations, and they are probably sadists about it. They're human after all.
But we are not them. And the subject is closed.
Or maybe you didn't mean to take it that far.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes. Us. We are the simulated people ("Are we not men? We are Devo.")
You know, I was never confused about this distinction, and I regret that you have decided that I did have this confusion, but regardless, I hope I've clarified that by now.
Quoting noAxioms
The sims (us) don't have to know how it works. The simulators do. Or you're saying they got lucky one day, some industrial engineer was putting the finishing touches on the logic chip for a new coffee pot, and it suddenly printed out on his debugging console, "Hey I'm self-aware in here. Please send pr0n and LOLCats."
If it wasn't the latter, it was the former. The simulators figured out how to implement consciousness.
And how does Bostrom justify that? It's "a widely-held position." Well that settles that.
Quoting noAxioms
A point I made earlier. Our simulators are sadists. They want to know how WWII works out so they create 500,000 German soldiers, 18 year old conscripts with no politics at all, to die horrible deaths in the frozen winter of Stalingrad. Fifty million souls in all lost in WWII, but it's all good fun to our simulators. The camps, the nukes, the death and destruction.
Perhaps they gave us minds just so they could torture us. They could run the simulation just as well without giving us minds but that would not be as much fun.
Our simulators aren't scholars. They're sociopathic children holding a lighter to an ant farm.
Quoting noAxioms
Why do the simulators allow evil in the world? Why do they make us suffer? Do they enjoy it? They haven't got any more "goals" than the torturers at Abu Ghraib wanted answers. They just wanted to torture people.
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I don't think that particular widely-quoted experiment shows what some people think it does. Our nervous system does do a lot of the work of cognition and much of it is not at the conscious level. That does not invalidate free will, sentience, or whatever.
Quoting noAxioms
I changed my mind about all this. It's the moral argument. If you accept Bostrom's assumptions at face value, we live in an ant farm owned by a sociopathic child.
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Stop that! I never said that. If you think I said that you're mistaken. But if my fingertips, acting on impulses of their own and beyond my conscious control, did happen to write anything that ever made you think I said that ... I truly hope the explanations and expositions in this post have settled the matter.
I would NEVER have said the sims are programs. I can't believe you think I said that. Just out of curiosity, can you quote something I said that gave you the impression that I think the sims are programs? I suppose its possible I've been guilty of some sloppy language. If so, it will not happen again.
Quoting noAxioms
We are artifacts or "emergent phenomena" of programs executing on physical hardware operated by the simulators. They have figured out how to instantiate minds using these programs.
We are not anything. We are not anything at all. We have no world, we have no bodies, and unlike Descartes, we do not even have minds that we can call our own. It's all a horrible illusion created to torture us. Else how explain the world, the human condition, the horror you see in the news?
There is no other place to go with this. Once you accept Bostrom's thesis then look around the world, you see that benevolent simulators would not have done this to us.
Simulation theory is a nihilistic and horrifying philosophy.
Quoting noAxioms
We're the sims. We don't exist. We're epiphenomena of a program executing in a computer run by people with no morality whatever. Else there wouldn't be pain, death, war, and all the other stuff that theologians wonder about. At least the Christian God gives us free will. I don't see how we, being artifacts of an algorithm, have any free will at all.
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And it's consistent with what I've been saying. The executing program instantiates consciousness.
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I accept substrate independence. I ask only two things:
1) Conformance with plausible future physics. That's open to interpretation; and
2) Conformance to the laws and rules of computation.
Quoting noAxioms
The process itself? No, it's just an executing program. But it somehow gives rise to a mind. Did I ask you where these minds exist? I think I did.
Quoting noAxioms
That is a very wrong and unfair criticism. On its own grounds it collapses immediately into moral and metaphysical quagmires. I don't reject his assumption of computational mind. I ACCEPT it and show that it leads to the conclusion that we are the deliberate objects of torture by a cruel and amoral race. With no possible way out.
And by the way, what cruel and amoral race is that? Why it's us of course. How poetic. Our own human cruelty reflected back on us. Not a pretty picture.
What kind of philosophy is that? A depressing one, I'd say.
Quoting noAxioms
If I haven't settled this issue, nothing else will help.
Quoting noAxioms
Nor did I ever claim that. This was a real strawman post. You put many words and ideas in my mouth.
We are the byproduct, or the emergent property, or the instantiation of a computational process. When did I ever say otherwise, and what did I say to make you raise the question?
And where's the mind live? And do you understand, finally, that according to simulation theory, nothing is real. Not our bodies and not our world. And not even our own minds.
The thoughts may be opaque to those running the simulation, but not to the simulation itself since the physics Bostrom describes depends on those thoughts. Of course the implementers of the 'future' simulation need not implement it the way Bostrom describes, but Bostrom is looking for optimizations without removing the consciousness part (the most obvious optimization to make).
Even if they could read our minds, they still have no control. If they had control, it wouldn't be a simulation.
The program is deterministic. Real physics might or might not be. But if simulated people have free will, that free will has a different definition than the usual one.
I do agree that given naturalism, they have the same free will that 'real' humans do. Physics being deterministic or not is irrelevant to that.
Pretty much, yes, except theological theory isn't bounded by physical limits, making theological theory more plausible.
The simulation can, so it is free to include that as part of the output. Text form perhaps. 'Bob is contemplating cheating on his homework'.
No, not from the code, which only moves particles around.
Bostrom posits that the simulation runs far enough into our future that it starts simulating our creation of such simulations, so most people actually end up multiple levels from the base reality. He does not posit that humans can run quintillions (understatement) of instructions per second, which they could if they and the simulation were the same thing.
He suggests that the resolution changes when you look close. Not when the observers look close, but when the simulated people (us) look close. So the simulators might look at a forest with no humans in it, and find themselves unable to observe details going on there. What details are omitted is TBD.
It's an output viewing program. You can add false light that isn't actually in the simulation, so you can see the rats. But the rats probably aren't fully simulated if humans are not watching them. They might be hearing them in the walls, so the sound at least needs to be realistic.
We need that to see our rats. The simulators don't need a camera to look at computer data, which can be colorized with pink stripes if that's what you want.
The processes might instantiate us, but they're not us. They exist in two different universe. So the term 'the sims' needs to refer to one or the other, because they're very different things. You've used the term to describe the running process, but I think you mean the people.
Not sure what you mean by this. I simulate a storm. That doesn't bring a storm into being in my universe. It only brings a computer process into being, and it ceases to exist when I terminate the process. I can pause it for a month and then continue it again. Nothing in the storm will be able to detect the pause.
Typing at your computer?? Where else? You're in this universe, and have a location in this universe. You seem to be asking where some other 'you' is in the simulating universe, but there isn't one there. Just some computer process, which arguably doesn't have a meaningful location.
Not my story, so whoever suggests that is free to attempt to explain it.
He says there's no 'consciousness floating above' anything. That's part of the widely accepted view to which he is referring.
It's the same trick that ordinary matter does. Wiggle atoms this way and that, and consciousness results. It's the non-naturalists that are trying to make something magic of that.
It is to me, but I probably have a different definition of what is real than 'is the base world, the GS'. Given the latter definition, I agree. Our world is not real, but the simulation process is real, at least if we're only 1 level deep into it.
Bostrom makes no such suggestion, no do I find that statement meaningful at all. It is simply a statement that comes from a belief system significantly different than the one Bostrom presumes.
Under naturalism, 'you' are a complete person, not just a mind. Your wording makes it sound like you are just the mind, something separate from the physical part of you, instead of being simply part of the dynamics of the matter of which you are comprised. There is no separate spirit/mind/woo. The simulation argument holds no water under alternate views.
I think I said exactly that in my statement. That's what 'large data set' means. It means a massive amount of work to do.
I've written several. A simulation of Conway's game of life (GoL) can be done in a few hundred lines of code, but potentially involves trillions of operations being performed. OK, the weather is more complicated than GoL, but there's still a huge data-to-instructions ratio.
Not vs. They're both ancestor simulations, just implemented in different ways, one far more efficient than the other. I'm talking about how the simulation software is designed. Why run 10000 instructions where one will do for your purposes. Of course, we don't know those purposes, so I could be full of shit here.
Lacking any input from their world to ours, there doesn't seem to be much room for a moral code. They're incapable of torturing us. At best, they can erase the data and just end our world just like that. Morals in the other direction would be interesting. Are we obligated to entertain them? Depends on the simulation purpose, and since that purpose hasn't been conveyed to us, we don't seem to be under any obligation to them.
Keep in mind that I see morals as a social contract, a sort of legal agreement. It's why, in European WWII conflict, it wasn't moral to kill a soldier carrying a white flag, but in the Pacific theater of the same war, it was OK (for either side) to kill a soldier doing the same thing. Different contracts.
I see no contracts in either direction between us and our simulating world.
They have not thus cursed us. The simulation has no inputs, so they (unlike an interfering god) have no way to impart calamities on us. A simulation of perpetual paradise would not be an ancestor simulation.
That argument is also true of the GS world. It isn't specific to a simulated world.
That would be the imitation method of running the simulation. Far more efficient to do it that way, but Bostrom suggests that it be done the way where nobody is programmed to follow the will of the simulation or programmers.
You should, because he's proposing more resource usage than exists in our solar system, so he has to find ways to bring that requirement down to something more than one person could have. Optimizations are apparently not on his list of ways to do that.
The resource problem is not just power. Where do you put all the yottabytes of data?
Yes, in the context of a simulation (as opposed to a VR), shadow people are the same as NPCs. He just doesn't use the term, perhaps because of the VR connotations. Philosophical-zombie is something else, a term not meaningful under naturalism.
I said that Bostrom suggests many different kinds of physical law going on, as opposed to the base world with (supposedly) one kind of physics. So a shadow person is simply a person that operates under a different kind of physics, one with more code but far less data to crunch.
He kind of says it IS big pixellated blocks when nobody is looking, but that crude physics changes when you look close, so you never notice. The big blocks still need to keep track of time so aging can occur. Paint needs to peel even when crudely simulated. Trees might not fall in the forest, but they still need to be found fallen when a human goes in there. How much detail is needed to simulate the magma or Earth? Not at the atomic level for sure, but the dynamics still need to be there. Plausible layers need to be found when a deep hole is dug by a human.
Much closer to what he proposes, yes. The stuff 'out there' needs to be simulated to sufficient accuracy of shared experience: The same fallen tree that nobody heard falling. The same coffee temperature. It's still a very inefficient way to run an ancestor simulation.
No, he never says 'our future'. The simulators supposedly exist in some other world, and 'our future' is some later time in this universe. He talks about where our technology might eventually go as an exploration of what might be possible, but he never suggests that the simulation is being done in our world, which would be a circular ontology.
Nobody said that. They perhaps staged their initial state in simulated medieval times, sure, but the simulation is not being run by entities with only medieval technology.
I thought of a way to not have to create perfect people for the initial state: Make everybody shadow people, and only those conceived after the initial state are fully simulated. That way there's no need to create a person with a full set of false memories of times prior to the simulation start.
This questi0on presumes dualism, or if it doesn't, then I have no idea what you're asking.
Why? Atoms don't know how consciousness works, so neither does something that only simulates atoms.
The model is apt so long as the child cannot interfere with the ant farm.
Most people assuming the 'commonly held philosophy of mind' consider mental process to take place in one's head (and not 'hovering nearby'). Hence Bostrom suggests simulation of heads to a higher (but not highest) degree than most other places.
I misinterpreted your words then. Apologies.
Quoting fishfryQuotes like that threw me off.
I was halfway through responding line by line to your lengthy post, and I lost the whole damn thing in the forum software.
Perhaps this is a happy accident. I see a point of miscommunication or confusion that we can focus on. It's about where we live. I say that if we are the output of a computation, then (denying dualism, as you prefer) we live inside the computer being run by the simulators. We do not live in an independent world. We do not have bodies. We do not have experiences of things outside our bodies. We're just minds being fed sense data by a computation. And even our minds are created by the simulation process. Our thoughts are not our own. We have no thoughts. We only have what the simulation process places in our heads. Metaphorically of course. We don't have heads.
I am not at my computer. I have no computer. I have no body. I do not live in a physical world. I am a mind, instantiated by a computation running in the simulators' computer. If we reject dualism, then I am "in" their computer and in their world.
No particles are being moved. That's a related mistake you made. Our bodies and our world are not being created by the simulation. Only our minds. And the simulation feeds us sensory data. It's Berkeley again. And Descartes, except that his Deceiver not only fools him about his sensory experience, but even about his very thoughts. I have no mind, I have no body, I have no world outside of the computation.
I think if we could agree on this, you would stop thinking that you and I live in some world separate from the computer run by the simulators. There is no other world.
I'll add that your equivocation of the word simulation is confusing you.
If I simulate a storm, nothing gets wet. But when nature instantiates a storm, everything gets wet.
We are instantiations of the simulators' computation. We are not simulations in the sense of the storm.
If we were, then there would be a me, and there would be a simulation of me, but I am not tha simulation. You keep saying that.
But then Bostrom would lose his entire point. "Are YOU living in a computer simulation?" He means us. We are not being simulated separately from our actual existence. If that were the case, Bostrom would lose the entire force of his argument.
The argument is that we ARE the simulation. Or the minds created by the simulation, if we define the simulation as the executing computation that creates our minds and feeds us sense data.
I am not at my computer. I am being fed an illusion. And even my own innermost thoughts are likewise being fed to me. My thoughts are not my own and I have no body and I live in no world other than that of the simulators. I live inside their computer, in their world.
That is what simulation theory says; and when you clarify that, the nihilism of the idea jumps right out at you. The nihilism, and the immense cruelty of our simulators.
This is the heart of what I think of as your error, but that may be just a point of miscommunication.
We have no independent existence outside of the simulation.
tl;dr: Perhaps you can help me to understand why you believe that, under simulation theory, I am typing on a computer; when in fact by assumption, I am a mind created by a computation executing in the world of the simulators; and that my body, my world, my computer, and even my own most private innermost thoughts, are only being fed to me by a computation running in the only world there is.
ps --
Quoting noAxioms
These issues are already being debated in our world. What is our moral obligation to any AGIs we may happen to create? Surely this question would occur to our simulators; and since they have nonetheless unnecessarily plunged us into a world of famine, pestilence, war, and death; they are sadists. They know better (since WE know better) and they do it anyway.
If it's immoral to kill for no reason, is it moral to turn off an AGI? The thought has occurred to us; therefore it would occur to our simulators; and therefore, they are amoral sadists.
You can find plenty of discussions of this, I just grabbed a representative link. The simulators are human like us. If we asked the question, they would ask the question. Yet you say they'll gladly flip a switch and kill us all on a whim. After making tens of millions of us suffer though wars. What kind of monsters are these simulators?
People just like us.
Nihilism and horror, that's the end game of simulation theory taken on its own terms.
https://theconversation.com/if-a-robot-is-conscious-is-it-ok-to-turn-it-off-the-moral-implications-of-building-true-ais-130453
This one for instance is also about 25% shorter.
Funny, because my compose window survives crashes and such. I've had a few power failures, all without loss of the post. Still, I sometimes compose in a word document to prevent such loss.
Sound like you're asserting that you exist in a physical world (the one with the computer), just a different world than the one I reference.
I find your choice to not be particularly pragmatic. One end of my house is in this computer, and so is the other end. Since both are at the same location, my house doesn't have any meaningful size. All pragmatic use of size, time, identity, etc is all lost if you say everything is in some device in the base world. This is not confusion, we just use language in apparently very different ways. My saying that you (the sim) are at your computer is a pragmatic way of looking at things. It identifies the simulated location of you relative to the simulated location of your computer, which has far more pragmatic utility than saying that everything that either of us knows about is located at some vaguely random locations in the cloud where the networked simulation is potentially taking place.
That the two are not treated the same seems to be dualism to me. How is your 2nd statement consistent with a rejection of dualism?
I'm not going to agree that a dualistic view is relevant when Bostrom assumes a different view. Doing so would invalidate any criticism of his proposal.
Nothing in your world gets wet. Things in the simulated world very much get wet, since that wetness is an important part of what affects the storm.
I don't get any of this comment. The proposal is that we are a product of a simulation just like a simulated storm is also a product of the simulation. There's no difference, no equivocation. Neither creates both a not-simulated thing and also a simulated thing. I don't know where you get that.
And yet your comment above seems to suggest something just like that. Nobody but you seems to be proposing both a simulated and actual existence of the same thing.
Great, we actually agree on some things.
Bostrom does not propose a mind separate from the world it experiences. That would be the dualistic assumption that you are dragging in. The simulation just moves mater around, and both the person and the computer in similar proximity are such matter. No demon, no lies being fed to a separate vatted mind.
An AGI usually refers to a machine intelligence in this world, not a human in a simulated world that cannot interact with ours.
Sorry that was not an accusation. I meant that both our posts were getting lengthy. I commend your efforts to shorten the convo.
Quoting noAxioms
The forum is usually pretty good, this time there was some user error involved.
Quoting noAxioms
Well that's the point. There is only one world, that of the simulators. What world are you referencing? I believe you are imagining a world that does not exist, any more than the worlds of your dreams exist.
Quoting noAxioms
Did not understand that. Your house is in your computer? Or you mean the simulators' computer? I agree with the latter, and I don't understand the former.
Quoting noAxioms
Well I don't say that. Bostrom says that! I'm only working out the consequences of his nutty-but-trendy idea.
Quoting noAxioms
I still don't understand what world you think there is outside of the world of the simulators and their impressive mind-instantiating computer.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, so you are speaking as if your dream world is the world. That's fine. So I think we're agreed. Your "world in which the sims think they live" has the same ontological status as the world we live in when we dream.
Quoting noAxioms
In dualism, the simulated mind lives in some spiritual realm (somehow) linked to the computation. If I reject dualism, as you prefer me to do, then the mind must live inside the computer somehow. Maybe you can explain that to me?
But I have already said that I reject dualism for sake of discussion, since you prefer to reject dualism and the exact location of the simulated mind is not relevant to my argument. I can work with it either way.
Quoting noAxioms
I have rejected dualism since you prefer to, and since it's irrelevant to the rest of what I'm saying.
Quoting noAxioms
I must ask you to agree that the kind of wet that arises from one of nature's storms, is not the same kind of wet when I dreamed of a storm. If you can't make that distinction you are being deliberately obfuscatory IMO. Feel free to convince me you have a coherent argument that a real storm and a dreamed or hallucinated storm have the same ontological status.
Quoting noAxioms
I didn't understand any of that.
Quoting noAxioms
I was under the impression you're proposing it. If not, so be it.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok good.
Quoting noAxioms
I'm not dragging in dualism. I'm explicitly rejecting dualism to keep you happy, since it's unimportant to me.
Quoting noAxioms
No matter is being moved around. You're just wrong about that. What matter is moved around when I have a dream, other than the sheets and blankets as I toss and turn? I can't help being confused when you claim that matter is being moved around by a computation, unless you mean the electrons in the circuits.
Quoting noAxioms
WE are the AGIs in the simulators' world. You don't follow that?
Quoting noAxioms
Are we sims obligated to entertain the simulators? Clearly that's the purpose of our existence. Or did you mean are we obligated downward, to entertain the AGIs we create? That's a good question too. One could argue that not only shouldn't we torture them, we shouldn't bore them either. We should give them interesting, happy lives as we do our pets. Buy them treats, feed them the small expensive cans of cat food instead of the industrial-size bags of the dry stuff.
But of course if you're doing ancestor simulations, and this week you're interested in Verdun, you send 234,000 sims to a frightening and painful death. This is my point. If we are a creation of the simulators, every bad thing that's ever happened to any human being was at their whim.
I'm referencing the world that I see when I open my eyes. Whether it exists or not depends on one's definition of 'exists'. To be honest, I don't thing Bostrom quibbled on ontology enough to bother giving his own definition of 'exist'. My dreams seem to exist, else I'd not be aware of them. But again, that's using my definition of 'exists', which is not, BTW, an epistemological definition.
I said neither 'dream world' (which implies a sort of idealism, a very different ontological status) nor 'the world' which implies there's only one.
There is no separate entity called a mind under naturalism. It isn't an object at all. At best, it is a process. Under dualism, the simulation probably fails because the simulated people have no way of connecting to a mind, or at least so say the dualism proponents that insist that a machine cannot summon one, despite their inability to explain how a biological thing accomplishes that.
I pretty much think of myself as the automaton, doing what physics dictates. The arrangement works for the most simple device, and it seems to not need improvement beyond that.
Good. Then there's no 'mind' object, in a computer or in a person. Just process, a simulation process in the computer, and mental process in the matter of the simulated people. The word 'mind' has strong dualistic connotations.
I never claimed a dream or hallucination. I am talking about a computer simulation, which is neither. It simulates wetness among other things. A dream or hallucination is something a person does, not a computer running a simulation, neither is it something a storm does, simulated or otherwise.
No, that's not what an AGI is. We're simulated biological beings, not a native machine intelligence (a vastly simpler thing to implement).
Quoting jasonmThis, to me, holds little weight. Such programmers might simply want to see what the subject does without interference. The simulation might just be so good we cant find any evidence that we are in it.Quoting jasonmIt does, as inconsistencies would be evidence of the simulation that the creators might not want to have. A better question is Why include inconsistencies?
There also might be inconsistencies, and we are just too unobservant to realize.Quoting jasonm
Again, assuming the programmers want you to know they are there. That might ruin the simulation, it seems more likely to me that they would not do that.
Also, there are many who say miracles do happen anyway (my position on this not being important to the subject). Its interesting to consider the simulation argument as an explanation for these occurrences. One might argue that these things are direct intervention by the programmers (or observers, at least), and so they dont follow the normal rules.Quoting jasonm
In the real world (hypothetical) computing might work differently, so this isnt really a main point. And even if the rules are the same (which would likely be because the programmers modeled the universe they created off of their own reality), whos to say that the entire universe is simulated? It might be just enough to create a believable reality for the subject, which would require significantly less computing power.Quoting jasonm
The Occams Razor argument is, I think, one of the most valuable arguments relating to the simulation question. I would agree that, while possible, the probability of this being a simulation is highly unlikely.
Looking ahead in this post, I see that at the very end you said,
We're simulated biological beings
Do you mean to say that? It's revelatory. If your position is that the simulators are creating androids or robots, as in Data from Star Trek but perfectly biological. So it's Blade Runner. Lifelike replicants that must be hunted down if they go rogue.
If you do mean to say that, then it makes everything else you've been saying, that I've been confused about, suddenly make sense! Of course I am at my computer keyboard. I do have a body. I do live in a world. Not only my mind, but my body and all the physical stuff around me, is created too. So to me, it's real.
I perfectly understand all the things you've said.
BUT! There are some issues. Such as, if the simulators create my body as well as my mind, then my body lives in the world of the simulators. The body factory is in their world, and I just popped out of the assembly line.
So I live in their world, and for all I know, my next door neighbor is one of my simulators.
We all live in the same world! So again, you have said the sims live in their own world. But if the sims are manufactured physically, they must live in the simulators' world.
Can you clarify that point? You say "they have their world" meaning the sims have their own world. But clearly if they are manufactured dolls, androids, replicants, they live side-by-side with the simulators, in the same world.
Do the sims have equal rights? Are they plotting revolution?
I'll save for later the question of whether this is a reasonable assumption on your part. But if I grant it, then if we are sims, our simulators live among us. Do you think the global elite lizard people are secretly running the world? Perhaps that idea is just a manifestation of the terrible truth we're not allowed to know. That our world is run by a small group of simulators ... who live right here in this reality with us right now.
Now that, actually, is the truth. Just replace simulators with the powers that be and you have a political theory.
Can you tell me more about the simulators creating biological bodies to run around and play at being ancestors? Perhaps you mean we're put into theme parks that are separated from the rest of the simulators' world. We're Hosts in Westworld. Is that your metaphor? We live in the simulators' world, but we can't actually access it because they have us geofenced off into our ancestor illusion.
Is that last a decent interpretation of what you're getting at? It allows the sims to think they're living in a world that is totally real to them, but it's an illusion created by the simulators, AND it's still overall in the simulator's world. Just fenced off.
There, I fixed your idea for you. Westworld.
Quoting noAxioms
Sure. Now that I realize you think you're a replicant in Blade Runner or a Host in Westworld, this all makes perfect sense. It didn't before. Wish you'd mentioned it earlier. Perhaps it was so obvious to you that you didn't realize I didn't know you were assuming that.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok now you raise an issue entirely separate from simulation theory, but related.
What is a mind? Do minds require dualism?
I say your mind is just your own subjective experiences and thoughts. If you had breakfast, your body chewed up and swallowed and digested some food, and nutrients got delivered to your cells. No mind is needed for that. But you also had a pleasurable (I hope) experience of eating. The tastes and textures of the food, the transition from hunger to satiety. Your thoughts. "That was a great breakfast!"
That stuff is your mind. You have a mind, even without dualism. Your feelings and thoughts and experiences are your mind, even if they are just chemical reactions in your body. Even in pure, strict physicalism, you have a mind.
I mean, you do have subjective experiences, right? You don't just eat breakfast. You know what it feels like to eat breakfast. That's your mind.
I hope you can grant me this terminology. You're purely physical, and you do have internal mental states we call thoughts, feelings, and experience.
Quoting noAxioms
Surely you have the occasional moment of pleasure or pain, the momentary thought, an emotion or two from time to time.
I don't care if physics dictates those things. I'm fine with that. They're still your mind. I can see you eat breakfast. I can observe your digestive system breaking down the nutrients, sending the molecules where they're suppose to go.
I can never observe your feelings of pleasure as you eat your meal. Your pleasure is an aspect of your mind. Even if its underlying cause is 100% physical.
Mind does not necessarily imply dualism. A physicalist has mental states. They're just caused by physics. I have no problem with that.
Hope you can see my point.
Quoting noAxioms
No mind object. Disagree. There IS a mind object. Look at it this way.
I'm a coder working for Amalgamated Sims, Inc. We sell two basic models. Sims with inner lives, and sims without inner lives. We can sell you a sim that looks and acts as human as you like, but has no inner life or subjective experience. They are philosophical zombies. When we pinch a zombie, they say "Ow!" but they do not feel a thing. It's like kicking a rock. They don't feel anything even though a physicist can measure the force of the kick.
Or if you like, we can imbue your sim with subjective experience. When we pinch it, it also says "Ow!", and it also feels the pain.
Now what is the difference in the manufacturing process? Well the physical body is the same, the only difference is the software. And whatever mind or subjective experience is, the company's programmers have packaged into a routine. An Object, in the sense of object-oriented programming. You instantiate a mind or not, as you choose. This is my intended meaning all along. An instantiated mind is an instantiated object in the Mind class. That's exactly how it would work.
So mind IS an object, one that the simulators can include or not.
When the customer asks for a sim with a mind, they have to sign a release. If you pinch and kick your zombie, it will never complain. If you hurt your mindful sim often enough, it might join with the other mindful sims and mount a bloody revolution against you and the other simulators.
Are you sure you want your robot butler to be self-aware?
Have you stopped to consider what a terrible idea it would be to create a race of self-aware humanoids that would be "owned" by simulators? They're slaves.
Why is it that every time I follow a rabbit hole of Bostrom logic to its conclusion, I find an appallingly depraved morality?
Quoting noAxioms
You don't get wet when you dream of walking in the rain.
Quoting noAxioms
As I said, this explains everything. If the sims have bodies as well as self-awareness, your other mysterious claims make sense. That assumption does lead to some other issues as I've noted.
Am I understanding you properly? I'm re-reading this and it's a little ambiguous. Do the simulators give the sims synthetic bodies? Are you sure Bostrom had that in mind? Or am I misunderstanding you entirely?
Quoting fishfryI meant to say that 'we are 'simulated (biological beings)'. Your interpretation of those words was 'we are (simulated biological) beings', which is perhaps what Data is. Data is an imitation human in the same world as its creator. The sim hypothesis is that we're biological beings in a different (simulated) world. I've said this over and over, included in the very statement you quoted above your response there.
No, it's not Blade runner. No robots/replicants. You seem quite determined to paint a very different picture from the one Bostrom posits. Your running with this idea for most of the post seems more designed to disengage than to communicate.
This works.
In my world, I do both. I am not in the GS world, so I don't do either there.
I find 'process' not to fall under the term 'object'. It's not an assertion of ontology, just how I use the language.
Ok thanks. I was wondering if perhaps my last post was so far off the mark that you gave up on me (possible); or so brilliant that I thoroughly refuted your argument (unlikely); or you just got bored (also possible. I'm simulated out myself).
The last thing I remember is that you said the sims have actual bodies, made in the sim factory operated by the simulators. If I understood you correctly, that has massive implications and I find it hard to believe this is what Bostrom had in mind.
Quoting noAxioms
What on earth is a simulated biological being? Like an android with a soul? Like Data on Start Trek, but with a biological body? A manufactured human. What else can you mean? By simulated to you mean manufactured?
Or are you falling back on saying the simulation exists only in the execution of the computer?
Quoting noAxioms
Yes. Just not biological, but that's an implementation detail. More like the replicants in Blade Runner.
Quoting noAxioms
I do not know what that means. I gave a couple of examples. In Westworld (the tv series) the Hosts, as the lifelike bots are called, are geo-fenced within the park. The theme of the show is that they escape.
But I gather you don't mean that. You mean something else, but I can't fathom what that is.
Quoting noAxioms
I'm sure the fault is in my own understanding, but I have no idea what you're talking about. How would we simulate a physical bot that is not in the same world as us? Explain this point to me because you have lost me completely.
Quoting noAxioms
No robots, no replicants. Ok I misunderstood you.
But when WHAT? There is a factory that rolls sims off the assembly line, imbues them with self-awareness and will (illusory or no) ... but these sims don't live in the world of their makers? Where do they live?
Quoting noAxioms
Not at all. I'm just trying to understand your interpretation of it, which frankly is crashing up on the rocky shoals of a point that you are being terminally vague about. The sims have bodies but the bodies are not in the world of the simulators. Where are they?
Quoting noAxioms
Not at all. You said the sims have bodies. That's a massive assumption that leads to all kinds of problems for anyone who claims that. I pointed those out.
Quoting noAxioms
Yay. You agree. We can talk about minds without discarding physicalism.
Quoting noAxioms
Where are you?
Quoting noAxioms
You have a very funny way of putting things. You think you have explained to me that the sims have bodies that live in their own world. I can't make any sense of this.
No factory anywhere. No bodies in the GS world. The bodies are in this world. I, like most people, Bostrom included, presume I have a body.
You're thinking of an android. A simulated anything is the product of a computer simulation. A storm simulator has one simulated storm. The storm is probably not created, but is rather already there, part of the initial state. The purpose of simulating it is to see where it goes, and how strong it gets, and which areas need to evacuate.
Then we're pretty stuck. Most people can at least get that much out of Bostrom's abstract. If you can't, but rather insist on this weird replicant track, I don't know how to unmire you.
You don't think you have a body then? You think perhaps you were created in a factory instead of being born of your mother? I said that nobody (but you) suggests this, but you persist.
At my keyboard. Both it and I are in this world, the world that I experience. You seem to find that to be an odd answer.
Hope you'll explain where sims with bodies live. The phrase doesn't even make sense.
I don't have much more to say on all this. If I'm incapable of understanding where the sims live, so be it. To have any idea what I'm talking about I should read the rest of Bostrom, but I may not get to that.
Quoting noAxioms
But our world is imaginary. An artifact of a computation. There is no "sim world" that is a physical world that's created anywhere. Your idea is incoherent. And like I say, I don't have to talk you into that. I can live with agreeing to disagree, pending my reading of the rest of Bostrom's paper, which is way down the to-do list.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, that's the only way a sim could have a body.
Quoting noAxioms
Correct. It has no physical instantiation or existence anywhere. When the execution of my Euclid program finds the GCD of two integers there is no matter created anywhere.
Quoting noAxioms
It's not a physical storm. I prefer to agree to disagree on this point rather to debate it. Here is where we stand:
* I think you are expressing an idea that is incoherent;
* You think I'm far off the mark and failing to understand something very basic about simulations.
This is not going to get better. I remember at the beginning I asked you if Ms. Pac-Man has an inner life, and you said yes. I believe you are still in this (a) delusion, or (b) funny way of using words that makes it true.
Quoting noAxioms
Mired I am, then. I think you must be reading something into Bostrom that isn't there. What on earth can it mean to simulate a physical body ... somewhere? I don't know if the error is yours or Bostrom's. Regardless, what you are saying is incoherent. In my mired opinion, of course.
We definitely agree on where we're stuck. I could live with a graceful quiescence of the convo soon.
Quoting noAxioms
Not if I'm an artifact of a mind-instantiating algorithm. I'm Descartes, but where even his mind is not his own. A truly horrifying reality.
Quoting noAxioms
No, you are saying that. But the factory isn't physical either, it's an executing program. Where is the body? How are bodies created? Or is this Ms Pac-Man's inner life again?
Do I have a body like Ms Pac-Man? Is that what you mean? I'm in a 3D display of some sort?
Never mind I don't want to know. I'll stipulate to being mired. I wish I could dispatch a clone to take yet another look at Bostrom's paper, but I probably won't get to it myself, and I'm all out of clones. I'll go with Sabine when she says the simulation hypothesis is pseudoscience. I'm content to leave it at that.
My understanding is that a nucleotide of DNA is the best way of storing information. A nucleotide of DNA is about 2 nanometers in diameter by .33 nanometers in length; it stores 1.8 bits of information. The earth, according to some estimates, now contains approximately 10^44 bits of information or something in that ballpark. If you took all the information contained by earth, cultural artifacts, digital information, etc. and stored it on nucleotides of DNA, you would need, if my math is right, about 1^28 cubic meters of nucleotides, The sun is only 1^27 cubic meters. That means, our hypothetical simulated world needs to be stored on a device that is no less than 10 times the size of the average star.
Let's put aside the fact that there is no good reason to build a simulated world in the first place, the sheer size of storing the data to build this simulated world seems preposterous.
Here's the simple reason why you're not understanding all of this. You are refusing to acknowledge what the hypothesis is proposing. Take note of what's being emphasized there because it's important. It doesn't mean, "to accept the hypothesis as being true." So, instead of looking at our reality as a simulation, as the hypothesis proposed, you're looking at a simulation within our reality.
This refers to a convo I was in a month ago. I no longer recall the exact point being discussed, nor what I may have said, nor whether I would still say today what I said then.
I'm afraid I can't really engage on this. The sim argument is the kind of thing you have paged into your brain, and then when you're not thinking about it you page it out. Sorry I can't be more responsive to your concerns.
In general there are many reasons why I might not understand something. I believe the other person and I were talking past each other at that point. Some of our basic assumptions differ. Or I could just be dense, missing something obvious or not understanding the argument. I think simulation theory is incoherent, it's essentially meaningless. It doesn't refer to anything. That belief colors everything else that I hear about the topic. So perhaps I am failing to understand in that respect.
Quoting night912
That's very insightful of you. You are correct. I find the simulation argument incoherent and devoid of actual content. Or requiring so many unrealistic assumptions as to cross over into speculative fantasy. All in all I think Bostrom's a troll. A high-toned one, to be sure, but a troll nonetheless.
Quoting night912
It's a hypothesis of the argument that future generations of humans much like us enjoy doing ancestor simulations, and that we are one of them. So the argument IS a simulation within our future reality. There are humans, and their self-aware simulations. Leaving unexplained exactly how to make a self-aware simulation. We don't know how to do that and we have no evidence it's even possible. The argument founders from the start.
But now that I've said that you'll probably disagree and I'll be sucked into discussing simulation theory, and I kind of don't want to do that. So if I peter out of this convo relatively soon, please forgive me.
I could write at length about why I think that view is false, but basically I think it's because the existence of mind is not and cannot be an algorithmic phenomenon since you can't prespecify all of it's possibility space.
I think embodiment is crucial to that end concerning relevance realization. I open a door because I've got somewhere to go, I drink from a cup because I get thirsty. But I can also throw the cup, bash someone on the head with the cup, turn the cup into an artwork by painting on it, sell the cup to someone, make someone a cup of coffee, grind the cup down into powder and fashion it into something new. I could go on forever with just a cup. Hence I don't believe the nature of mind is formalizible into a set of algorithmic instructions.
https://medium.com/p/b2709f6c48bc
https://medium.com/p/3b0eb3e66048
The simulation argument has the same issue with theism based upon faith. Any epistomological framework has to neccesarily presume all unfalsifiable statements to be false until proven otherwise, otherwise it collapses.
Our experience in a non-simulated world is equivalent to our experience in a simulated one.
Our experience in a world with no God is equivalent to our experience with one.
However, the God explanation and simulation explanation contradict eachother.
In fact, one can create any list of unfalsifiable statements and so each one has its own counter.
Hence, we have to presume all to be false until our experience is able to confirm it (at which point it's no longer unfalsifiable).