From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Jun 23 2002 - 01:01:17 MDT
Mike writes
> > Now an "observer" of our simulation either is vastly more intelligent
> > than we are or he is not. If he is, then he may look down upon the
> > events in our brains (or simulated brains) as being sub-whatever-he-is,
> > and may rightly prove that by his standards we are not conscious,
> > feeling, etc. But if he is anywhere near our level, then he *MUST*
> > admit that I'm conscious.
>
> S/He/IT might admit you are an AI in this simulation, but is under no
> compunction to admit anything more, no matter what the comparative
> intelligence of you and it. It may recognize coding for self awareness
> if it is that capable, but doesn't necessarily equate self awareness
> within this simulacra with self awareness within their own. Nor,
> apparently, have they empowered you, or I, to operate avatars within
> their own environment, or to even have confirmed evidence of its
> existence.
You are saying that the beings running our simulation may
be able to detect that we are self-aware, but that they
wouldn't necessarily equate it to their own self-awareness?
Why not? How many different kinds of self-awareness are
there? I see that you have no difficulty supposing that
the characters in your dreams and in books have your kind
of self-awareness.
Of course they haven't empowered us to operate avatars
within their own environment, or it would be all over
the newspapers.
>> Many researchers believe that the whole MPS thing is a fraud.
>> Year after year CSICOP's Skeptical Inquirer runs articles
>> debunking it. Since MPS is not a verified phenomenon, your
>> speculation here is also imaginary.
> Quite so. But then, imagination is the thing, isn't it? One thing I've
> learned in life is that we make our own demons and angels, trials and
> tribulations. What anybody else thinks of how we perceive ourselves is
> really about as useful as a square screw.
So? If MPS is a fraud, then we have exactly zero indication
that a conscious human can host more than one person. An even
stronger argument is that it would have been very costly for
evolution to have endowed us with that capability.
> > Do you have any evidence whatsoever that a "universe" is ever
> > launched by an exercise of your imagination? Keep in mind
> > that your brain can in reality support only so much calculation.
>
> Our minds are not expected to be matched for another decade or more by
> man made computers. They are the paramount supercomputers of the day.
> Looking at our minds thusly, rather than as the fallible, oft mistaken,
> fanciful, emotive, irrational organs they are regularly ridiculed as,
> leads one to the inescapable conclusion that if we are in a simulation...
> then our brains are evanescent generators of other universes.
We come right back to this statement that has bugged more people
than just me. Doesn't it sound a little high falutin' to claim
that one's brain generates a universe? A whole universe? Or
only a *few* galaxies and quasars? Do cats' brains also generate
universes? You lose me when you talk like this.
> Does a new universe collapse once you've been distracted or awakened
> from the dream that created it? Likely not, though likely entropy
> within it only progresses as you think about it, but this is a rather
> deep question to ask, isn't it?
Let me try to get a grip on this. Suppose that we go to
a sleep clinic, and carefully monitor a patient as he
enters into the five levels of sleep. I am certain that
no instruments would detect a mass increase, so your
"universe" must only be a metaphor. Okay, so there is
all sorts of weird electrical activity going on that we
don't exactly know the purpose of. Presumably, the rest
that the tired brain is getting contributes to waking
survival. Some parts of the brain during REM evidently
try to piece together the random inputs their getting
into a believable interpretation, and so we get fragments
of images, ideas, and audio that we even can remember.
This sounds *awfully* thin to describe the way that you
like to. We should, instead, view the reposing patient
as undergoing various hallucinations and delusions, and
to not be actually entirely conscious at all.
> > Even if you are a tremendously skillful author, and have poured
> > a great deal of effort into fleshing out a character, that
> > character does not have an independent consciousness---that is,
> > a piecemeal examination of the brain of that author will show
> > only *one* consciousness. The purported character will be found
> > to be nothing but a bunch of visual and auditory fragments in
> > the author's imagination. Not a person at all.
>
> What is the source of your consciousness? Why is it that characters
> within your dreams all act as very conscious individuals, often with
> wills of their own and beyond our control? They may all have only the
> consciousness that our brains timeshared to them in the dream, but then,
> where do we all get ours?
Consciousness is evolution's answer to how to generate animal
behavior most in accord with survival: it was found that giving
the brain access to recent memory in such a manner that current
activity could be deeply affected afforded much better survival
chances.
In dreams, we for the most part project consciousness on to the
images and voices of people that we imagine, much like we project
such consciousness onto other people in real life, even though
we don't, of course, actually generate that consciousness. So
in a dream we suddenly imagine that we hear someone say something,
and we don't for some amazing reason remember our own contriving
of that statement. It still seems like a leap to project a full-
blown consciousness onto people we think we see and hear in
dreams.
> > Well, people have been hallucinating since the dawn of time.
> > Some part of their brains indeed produce action and dialog
> > that they're not conscious of.... But we have no evidence
> > that such a "person" has any kind of separate identity, or
> > "thinks" over anything but an extremely short term interval.
>
> They have no separate identity within our universe. We have
> no evidence that they don't have one in theirs.
I'm suggesting that we have no evidence whatsoever that
there even is any universe but ours.
Yes, someday when we mount full blown simulations, we may
be able to judge with a lot of evidence that it hosts
self-aware creatures. But that's only because we are
going to, unlike nature ever has, invest huge amounts
of resources to create such simulations. Likewise, if
we are living in a simulation, you can bet that the
originators sunk a lot of bucks into it.
Lee
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:58 MST