Maybe life is a simulation.

[Valsum]

True. And there we get to where we got once in IRC, Jos. We aren't able to achieve complete truth

So being able to wonder and be surprised and amazed is cool, despite your philosophical stance, as you say.

[simulism]

Somebody pointed me to this discussion; I'm the one who created the simulism wiki and it's interesting to see what kind of discussions it sprouts.

While I'm here, I might as well join the discussion. (for the second time, on my first attempt I got banned for posting a wikipedia link; first forum I see that bans on posting a link while still offering the 'url' button in the reply screen )

So is simulism a crazy idea or not?

First let me say that the difference between simulism and the 'aliens in the sun' idea, or the more famous 'flying spaghetti monster' (see wikipedia), is that this is not just a random idea, it's about having a look at our current technology and having a look where it is going. It's fun to ponder the implications of being able to realistically simulate people (which we will one day be able to, it's just a matter of time).

I like the argument posed here that a human cannot be reduced to chemical and electrical processes. However, think about the 'Brain in a vat' thought experiment for a minute. (you can find it on wikipedia)

If you were to disconnect the nerves that go into your brain, reroute them and simulate all the electrical impulses (the ultimate virtual reality experience), would you be able to tell the difference? Think back, when was there an event in your life that you did not experience using only your 6 senses?

In any case, idiocy or not, it is a fun topic to ponder.

[Jos Elkink]

Somebody pointed me to this discussion; I'm the one who created the simulism wiki and it's interesting to see what kind of discussions it sprouts.

Well, welcome here!

on my first attempt I got banned for posting a wikipedia link; first forum I see that bans on posting a link while still offering the 'url' button in the reply screen

You can post links, but not in your first post ... Practically without exception, people that post links in their very first post are spammers. So far, I think you're the only false positive on our home-made spam filter .

In any case, idiocy or not, it is a fun topic to ponder.

Yeah, I agree. Instead of going into a deep debate about whether or not humans could be simulated, which is a probably unanswerable philosophical question, you can at least assume you can and assume it is happening and then see where that leads us. What happens to moral values, for example, if this is the truth? What would you base your ethics on?

[Russell of Los Angeles]

Somebody pointed me to this discussion; I'm the one who created the simulism wiki and it's interesting to see what kind of discussions it sprouts.

...

If you were to disconnect the nerves that go into your brain, reroute them and simulate all the electrical impulses (the ultimate virtual reality experience), would you be able to tell the difference? Think back, when was there an event in your life that you did not experience using only your 6 senses?

In any case, idiocy or not, it is a fun topic to ponder.

Welcome here!

Thanks for starting the simulism wiki. I've long been interested in the subject. I'd like to contribute, but I couldn't find the page to create an account.

I think Bostrom has a great argument about why it's likely that we are living in a simulation. However, as I said, I disagree with one of his premises, so I disagree with his conclusion.

The brain in a vat scenario (or brain in a body in a vat scenario, ala Matrix) doesn't benefit from the Bostrom's thesis, since Bostrom suggests that the brain is also simulated. This leaves the brain in a vat scenario extremely unlikely, though, I suppose, possible.

I prefer scenarios along the lines of Plato's Alegory of the Cave and religious mysticism. I feel that Bostrom's thesis can be generalized and abstracted to apply to these cases. Like the Cave, a computer simulation can be used as an alegory. I believe that there is something, on some level, that is more real than what we perceive through the senses.

[Russell of Los Angeles]

Hello everybody. I'm back, but not to play Cantr. I have come to bring you this:

Simulism
http://www.simulism.org/Simulism
"Gaming is one reason for simulation. Studying behaviour is another. Like a boy studying a colony of ants in a jar, we run simulations to assist us in every-day decision making. We simulate the weather, the stock market, animal life etc. It is not unthinkable that as science progresses, we would even run simulations of human evolution. With enough processing power, we could run realistic simulations of any historical event, or life in general. In this scenario, the chances are similar that we are part of one such simulation."

Maybe the year is really 2080. Maybe Cantr IX has already been developed and implemented.

Maybe we are the charries.

Sounds like someone's seen 'The Matrix' too many times and is shallow enough to begin to believe that parts of it could be real.

Sounds like someone's seen the 'The Matrix' and is presumptuous and/or ignorant enough to believe that parts of it could not be real.

[simulism]

Thanks for the welcome;

Russell: there's a 'login/create account' link on the top right, but you are right, it's somewhat obscured. I've added some more of them to the homepage and the 'not logged in' warning page.

Which one of Bostrom's arguments do you disagree with?

I differentiate between first degree and second degree simulations. First degree is the 'total simulation' (there is no real person 'outside'); Second degree is 'Brain in a Vat'.

One big issue that science has not yet solved is whether 'consciousness' is simulatable. Is the 'me' concept a biological/chemical process or is there more? Ir it's biological/chemical, a first degree simulation would be possible. If not, the maximum that could be possible is a brain in a vat.

Jos: I understand, I was just a little surprised about it.

[Russell of Los Angeles]

Which one of Bostrom's arguments do you disagree with?

I differentiate between first degree and second degree simulations. First degree is the 'total simulation' (there is no real person 'outside'); Second degree is 'Brain in a Vat'.

One big issue that science has not yet solved is whether 'consciousness' is simulatable. Is the 'me' concept a biological/chemical process or is there more? Ir it's biological/chemical, a first degree simulation would be possible. If not, the maximum that could be possible is a brain in a vat.

Bostrom assumes that consciousness is simulatable, doesn't he? I don't think it is. ...not, at least, by a computer. Here's something from Matt Cartmill that I really like:

A digital computer is essentially a grid of slots, each of which can be either full or empty. We think of these as ones and zeroes. Some of these slots are linked causally by rules of operation, which provide that when a certain pattern shows up in some area, the contents of other slots are changed in various ways, which may depend on the contents of yet other slots. In modern computers, the ones and zeroes are represented by electrical charges in semiconductors, but they could be represented by anything: holes punched in cards, or beads on wires, or eggs in egg cartons. The medium doesn't matter: what's important is the algorithm. All the operations that you do on a computer could be done in exactly the same way by giving a team of people written instructions for moving eggs around in a football field full of egg cartons, though of course it would take longer. (By the way, a football field full of egg cartons has about 1 megabyte of RAM.)

This fact poses problems for computational theories of the mind. If moving electrical charges around in a certain pattern can produce subjective awareness and bring a mind into existence, so can moving around a collection of eggs in the same pattern; and if I knew how many eggs to use and what rules of operation to use in moving them, I could make my egg collection think it was Elizabeth Dole or the Wizard of Oz. I could get the same effects by making chalk marks on a blackboard, or waving semaphore flags, or singing songs, or tap dancing. All these processes can be computationally equivalent, with algorithms that correspond in every detail; but none of them seems like a plausible way of producing a subjective awareness. And since a digital computer is just another way of instantiating an algorithm, it seems impossible for such a device to become conscious. If we ever succeed in creating an artificial intelligence, it's going to have to be something more than just an algorithm machine.

From his essay, Do Horses Gallop in Their Sleep?:
http://www.comet.columbia.edu/~shane/wo ... usness.htm

[deadboy]

The brain in a vat simulation is a very curious idea, I can't say I was thinking of that at the time of arguing (Although that's not to say I haven't thought about it before, in quite some detail). Whether or not we take consciousness as the result of processes, or whether we think it is some special unsimulatable thing, the brain in a vat theory still works. Take for example that we are in "Cantr IX". We have become fed up of the outside world, and so have decided to take part. Our memories have been wiped (We can do that already I believe through certain hypnosis treatments), we have been plugged into a machine which sends signals to our brain along the same paths as the nerves of our sense, and at the age of about eleven when the brain is no longer young (Although not strictly fully developed) we are born into the world with a false set of memories. Everyone else saw us as children as NPC's. When we wake -how- could we ever tell if we were actually in the correct reality or not? A curious possibility but an interesting one.

However the other type, of just a computer simulation that involves no previous consciousness but instead creates one, I do not believe that is possible due to perceptions. If we were brain in a vat, each one of us would see the world differently, however if we were computer simulated, all that would be seen would be the outcomes of our consciousness, for example me typing, and I would not actually be thinking about typing as I did it because "I" would not exist, I would merely be numbers connected with every other numbers

[Russell of Los Angeles]

A common assumption in the philosophy of mind is that of substrate-independence. The idea is that mental states can supervene on any of a broad class of physical substrates. Provided a system implements the right sort of computational structures and processes, it can be associated with conscious experiences. It is not an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon-based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon-based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well.

Arguments for this thesis have been given in the literature, and although it is not entirely uncontroversial, we shall here take it as a given.

This is what I don't accept as a given as I've already explained with the help of Cartmill. Argumentatively, I guess this doesn't count as a technical disagreement, since I can still dialogue about his proposition for the sake of argument.

[Russell of Los Angeles]

In any case, idiocy or not, it is a fun topic to ponder.

Yeah, I agree. Instead of going into a deep debate about whether or not humans could be simulated, which is a probably unanswerable philosophical question, you can at least assume you can and assume it is happening and then see where that leads us. What happens to moral values, for example, if this is the truth? What would you base your ethics on?

See Cartmill, above. It's a simple argument.

But perhaps, as Cartmill leaves open, it's possible to simulate humans by means other than a computer. So to answer your question, I don't think it matters whether or not we are being simulated. Some people are not moral realists. They say that there's nothing to base moral values on anyway, even if we're not simulated. I think that moral values are context sensitive, which means they've got to relate to this human experience, even if we are simulated.

Before the sequels were released, some people supposed that Neo and Morpheous might have only escaped from one simulation into another. Perhaps we are a brain in a vat in a Sims game on someone's computer, who is in turn only the dream of a god.

But simulated suffering is still suffering. And there's enough of that to base a morality on, no matter who's dreaming me.

[simulism]

Cartmill's argument is a weird one; he makes the egg comparison to make it less plausible that consciousness can be simulated by it. I'd say it's just a matter of egg-numbers. my statement then would be: 'given enough eggs, any footballfield can be queen Elizabeth.'

As long as we don't know whether consciousness is only a result of the electrical signals in our brain (which can be simulated with ones and zeros), the question remains unanswerable.

[Jos Elkink]

If moving electrical charges around in a certain pattern can produce subjective awareness and bring a mind into existence, so can moving around a collection of eggs in the same pattern (...) All these processes can be computationally equivalent, with algorithms that correspond in every detail; but none of them seems like a plausible way of producing a subjective awareness.

I don't like this quote at all ... That is, it is totally devoid of a logical argument. Just because this Matt can't imagine consciousness through a collection of eggs doesn't mean that it is impossible. Most things we do with computers were unimaginable just a few decades ago. Especially in the area of complex systems / non-linear / evolutionary / etc. algorithms, we can create very unexpected and impressive things using, indeed, just algorithms and bit settings. So why not consciousness? I'm not saying you can, I just mean that he gives no argument at all why not, so I don't really understand why you quote him like that ...

EDIT: Oh, simulism already said it ...

[deadboy]

If moving electrical charges around in a certain pattern can produce subjective awareness and bring a mind into existence, so can moving around a collection of eggs in the same pattern (...) All these processes can be computationally equivalent, with algorithms that correspond in every detail; but none of them seems like a plausible way of producing a subjective awareness.

I don't like this quote at all ... That is, it is totally devoid of a logical argument. Just because this Matt can't imagine consciousness through a collection of eggs doesn't mean that it is impossible. Most things we do with computers were unimaginable just a few decades ago. Especially in the area of complex systems / non-linear / evolutionary / etc. algorithms, we can create very unexpected and impressive things using, indeed, just algorithms and bit settings. So why not consciousness? I'm not saying you can, I just mean that he gives no argument at all why not, so I don't really understand why you quote him like that ...

EDIT: Oh, simulism already said it ...

Yes, but frankly, it's stupid for another reason too. With electronical signals they are moving themselves about, with eggs he specifically says that they are being moved about. If the eggs read their patterns, defined what it was thinking, and moved themselves about into another pattern that meant something else, then damned right it's conscious. However, if we are moving them about then it is just out consciousness coming out through the eggs. It is proof of consciousness, but only ours.

[Jos Elkink]

I'm not at all convinced of that ... If we could simulate the 'algorithms' used in our consciousness, and just apply them blindly to the eggs without purposively creating certain patterns, we might be having eggs that are thinking.

Don't forget that the user moving the eggs is only strictly applying the algorithm, not creating results on purpose.

[Antichrist_Online]

The reason I mentioned the Cave allegory is that's all the article seems to be to me. An advanced and abstracted form of the same thought experiment.