Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

An analogous way of saying this argument is, this world is a dream. It is a reflective dream that builds content based on the observations of the observers within that content. If I look over here, it tells me about here, if I look there, info about there. As I build understanding and knowledge about the things I&#x27;m looking at, about the act of looking itself, I gain the ability to ask deeper questions against what is effectively a lookup table of information about existing truths of the dream that I have already observed. As I observe those events more closely, and build a better reference or lookup of the information related to them, they in a sense become more stable and more solid.<p>In the current state, all of the aspects of what me might consider a standard &quot;dream&quot; are present, they just exist within the wrapper of technology. The standard sufficiently advanced technology is magic argument. Truly, all technology is magic, just accomplishing magical goals with a symbolic wrapper of tech.<p>Another way to look at it, is we all live within a light hologram. All of existence is a light hologram. It is like a bright point of light that we are continually looking closer at, and as we do, we discover the complexities of color and form within what was originally just a wash of light. All&#x2F;No Colors -&gt; White&#x2F;Black -&gt; RGB, ect... Researchers have already demonstrated the capacity to create subatomic particles using nothing but the confluence of light. It isn&#x27;t a huge leap to then surmise that all &quot;matter&quot; is actually condensed or bound light.<p>We are effectively consciousness objects sharing the delusion that we all possess &quot;physical&quot; bodies and interact with a material world, but its a reflective argument, because the material objects we interact with are only material to things within the simulation of materialism. Its like we&#x27;re all on the Star Trek holodeck, but the joke is that we&#x27;re all actually the Doctor, and all the meat things which think they exist within the &quot;real&quot; world, are fundamentally just as immaterial as the Doctor - sharing only the one thing they all possess, which is consciousness, and the ability to observe, interact with, and build knowledge about their external world.

My alma mater ^_^. The basic loop is : <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;monad.ai&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;dev_framework.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;monad.ai&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;dev_framework.png</a> You can alter the environmental context easily by re-directing the wire in&#x2F;out : <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;monad.ai&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;dev_context.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;monad.ai&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;dev_context.png</a>. An individual would be none the wiser.<p>Sure we could be in a simulation. It&#x27;s interesting to ponder on it. You&#x27;ll begin forming answers when you dissect the different components, relationships, interactions, and try to create your own version of it : Say AGI.<p>;)

His book &quot;Robots: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind&quot; is really excellent, even if he takes quite a few gigantic logical leaps that aren&#x27;t really justified, imo. It&#x27;s just a great piece of futurology.

Morpheus from The Matrix: &quot;What is real? How do you define &#x27;real&#x27;? If you&#x27;re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then &#x27;real&#x27; is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.&quot;<p>Doesn&#x27;t feel like there&#x27;s ultimately any way out of this line of reasoning. What would it take to prove to you that you are indeed not in a simulation of some kind? as the only methods of providing proof are also parts of the simulation.

My main problem with the simulated world argument is complexity. Take the Billiard Ball example[0]. This means to accurately simulate the universe you can&#x27;t really get away with approximations. Under close enough scrutiny discrepancies in the simulation are discernible, and we can scrutinize it at the subatomic level. But to simulate the observable universe, how big would your computer need to be? How slowly would the simulation run relative to the simulator&#x27;s real-time? It just doesn&#x27;t stack up.<p>The only way to do it would be to fake it by generating the appearance of a thorough simulation rather than the reality of one. In which case the arguments put forward for wanting to perform a real simulation - to simulate history and so forth - break down because you&#x27;d only be emulating the appearance of it not simulating it.<p>The only way out of this I can see is if the universe containing the simulator were vastly more complex than ours, such that in comparison our universe would be trivial to simulate. But then why would they do it? Our universe would be nothing like theirs. In principle this is possible, but it massively reduces the chances that our world is a simulation because only a subset, and quite possibly a vanishingly small subset, of possible universes would be capable of hosting the simulation. Possibly fewer universes that there are universes like ours. At which point the odds of ours being a simulation collapse.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anecdote.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-billiard-ball-example&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anecdote.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-billiard-ball-example&#x2F;</a>

The elephant in the room of the assembled Gaian biomorphs is the Human capacity for discerning <i>meaning</i>. <i>Meaning</i> and consciousness are very much related.<p>A simulation is only dealing with <i>form</i>.

The evil demon which Descartes described is very real - it is one&#x27;s own mind conditioned by dogmas, traditions and so called collective consciousness, and the illusions that such a mind produces are as good as real.<p>Simulations can tell nothing new about the true nature of reality, because any simulator would reflect the current assumptions up to date and will be based on an oversimplified model. Weather simulation is not a weather. Map is not a territory.

&gt; The prescientific suggestion that humans derive their experience of existence from spiritual mechanisms outside the physical world has had notable social consequences, but no success as a scientific hypothesis.<p>Why?

I thought about this essay a fair bit over the years. It&#x27;s one of the things that persuaded me that reality is mathematical in nature.

in the dream for oriental philosophy we create the connoisseur, the knowledge, and the known object. or in other terms the object experienced, the experimenter and the experience of the object known.

I am very happy to see this at least bring up one of the most strange parts of Everett&#x27;s many-worlds (and others&#x27; &quot;many-minds&quot;) theories: that in them, you are immortal; for there always exists a possible world which you didn&#x27;t lose consciousness in, and your final consciousness will only propagate into those worlds.<p>Searle&#x27;s objection still seems to hold some water, though. Consciousness does not seem to be a computation because whether something is a computation is observer-relative; for some observers this set of electrical flickering makes sense as a computation to produce a sunflower-like pattern of points based on emitting branches in directions of (pi * the golden ratio) radians... but for the vast majority of observers probably it doesn&#x27;t seem like anything until I print out a picture of the result; and even then it might not mean anything to those observers (they might be blind, or they might not associate it with sunflowers, or they might have alien brains so differently wired from mine that they simply cannot appreciate art the way that humans can). We actually have formally defined computation to be observer-relative in precisely the way that the status of what words a book contains and what those words together mean is observer-relative (think that in some other parallel universes the English language was exactly the same but that the words for &#x27;cat&#x27; and &#x27;dog&#x27; were transposed, and so this same book tells a somewhat different story in those worlds).<p>The problem is that my two bunnies seem to be quite conscious, to say nothing of myself or my girlfriend. It&#x27;s not just that they&#x27;re conscious-relative-to-me-but-it-depends-who&#x27;s-looking... if that&#x27;s true then it&#x27;s a very different perspective which almost nobody takes seriously and practices. My bunnies just seem to be conscious, full stop. They appear to have both interests and the capacity to feel pain (observer-relative consciousness), but it appears to be more than just an appearance! In some sense they are objective observers who their own consciousness is relative to; therefore they are objectively conscious in a way that computations just don&#x27;t seem to be objectively anything.<p>The hope of the functionalist approach to consciousness, with its common-sensical &quot;anything which could replace this airy-fairy consciousness stuff in all of its functional roles would be equally justified to be called conscious,&quot; is therefore that as processes with no-intrinsic-meaning become more complex and more involved, there is some way to say &quot;no, the parts of that don&#x27;t have much intrinsic meaning by themselves, but you put them together and then this thing is objectively computing X or Y, there is just no other way for an observer to view it, it has passed a complexity threshold beyond which there is only one interpretation of it.&quot; Our books, with the cat &lt;-&gt; dog substitution looming in our minds, clearly don&#x27;t pass this threshold by-and-large, but perhaps things more complicated processes than those books&#x27; narratives can?