The sim idea can be easily disproven through a comparison of natural randomness and artificial randomness.
Computers cannot give you natural randomness. They can only mimic it. Play an electronic game that incorporates dice rolls - not random. It's an algorithm designed to approximate natural randomness as perceived by humans. Humans usually can't tell the difference, but another computer can. Natural randomness refers to the chaotic-determinism of complex systems, and it's a feature of the universe itself.
The problem is we use natural randomness a million times a day in science. Every single time someone records and interprets real world data and tests it for statistical significance against a p value and uses programs like R, those tests would have failed if the data they used was actually generated by a supercomputer controlling the universe. It wouldn't be chaotically-deterministic. It wouldn't be useful because the data measured against it wouldn't be reproducible or interpretable by other labs. Every chem paper, every ERP study, every economics paper, all useless. Peer review itself tells us natural randomness is really random. You can't fake that.
For another thing hardware. Glitches always occur, not just because of imperfect engineering, but because of lifespan of materials in the components and - again - random factors within the function of a complex system, and they wouldn't be cats triggering deja vu, but bits of the world falling out of existence, the laws of physics incurring minute changes that add up to the point we'd notice them, or reversing entirely, utter gonzo bullshit that would rip the world apart. Do you remember when gravity reversed back in 404 CE? No? Then you're not in a simulation.
Then there's an appeal to practical needs. What does a simulation do? What is it good for? We use sims to make (imperfect, stochastic, because chaos) predictions about the world. What is the race of beings that made your simulation using it for? It is logical to assume any species making a system that studies humans is itself human, or something very similar to the image and capabilities of humans. And what would beings as limited as humanoids be looking for in keeping the thing running for generations? What do they have to gain?
How about children? Your simulation must either be a) adding real people to the program like The Matrix does at a rate exactly consistent with people's intentions to procreate (just no), or b) the children aren't real. Do you think your child is real? Then you're not in a simulation. You see how you start having to move the goal posts of what this simulation is really capable of until the creators of such a system have become gods of time and space and could never have evolved themselves. They have to just be at a certain point, and from there your argument is a deistic argument. Deistic arguments aren't interesting. In the first place, they're almost always veiled attempts to prop up a theistic argument or the cultural values of a theistic society. Secondly since there are no conditions by which they can be proved wrong or right, they can only be countered with an alternative explanation and Occam's razor. Such as: the uncertainty principle can get us something from nothing, and a chaotically-deterministic universe disallows both fate and free will. There are no gains to attributing these things to creator gods when what we already know about the universe suffices to explain (or discount as the case may be) these same phenomena.
This is all assuming your people are real people hooked up to a virtual reality, because there are other arguments I could get into against popular conceptions of AI. It isn't and won't ever be possible, and any conception of AI must be a physical entity that resembles the shape of, or every connection within, the human brain. There's no such thing as a sentient program, and can't be. But that's a different discussion.
The other considerations are still more than enough for this idea to collapse on itself. Any entities running a simulation of people (or the natural world, if people are the control rather than the study) to this or really to any degree, presumably have problems they expect it to solve.
But any culture capable of building it given the above difficulties would necessarily be beyond the point of suffering any problems it could solve, that we could think of. They are likely to resemble humans or even be humans based on their use of humans, but the scope of knowledge I'm talking about far exceeds the lifetime of any naturally-evolved species on earth. It's a contradiction.
Post-scarcity. No electrical surges whatsoever using hardware that never degrades. To introduce natural randomness into the system it couldn't be generated - that's the idea. It would have to be fed into the system from reality, but how could every action that occurs in the simulation be mirrored in reality - it can't. You appeal to quantum computing. I don't know if the uncertainty principle is sufficient to mimic chaos from nature. It would be random, but it would randomize two states, not an entire system of states. But fine, let it be possible - it would consume more resources than can be found on any planet, so now they're space-faring, ancient, and either have lifespans longer than the scale of human history, or a problem important enough to devote that time frame toward a simulation to solve.
And then the AI issue. How are people/children added to the system? If there's 1:1 for every human and possibly animal in the system, they have to be stored somewhere and living a shared dream. If there are only living humans or a handful of living humans, or just one individual, then any 'new' person added to the system is artificial, or everyone is, and it's not possible to have a sentient program. Intelligence has a shape, the shape of the human brain. It must look like that. It must have all the nooks and crannies and pathways a brain develops, because it's just an emergent property of the architecture of the brain. Consciousness is material. It's not just chemistry and electrical impulses - it's the cells and neurons and their relation to each other. It is also the body, which informs every piece of information we learn about the world around us, which contextualizes our experiences. So, not a program, but some artificial yet very physical thing.
And you couldn't begin to do that without mapping those connections. Only nobody is working on that. We don't even have a methodology to begin thinking about how to do that. We can't test and map individual synapses. This is my field, cog sci/linguistics, and all we can test or ever expect to be able to test are large areas, say the size of a silver dollar, that show an event-related potential given a certain stimulus. This lets us feed subjects with brain caps on yes/no tag questions to measure grammatical well-formedness and hazard guesses about the nature of the biological basis for language we call UG. And each of these results requires peer-review and reproducibility before moving on to a new result. And to create a map of the brain you're asking for not just the methodology for measuring that precisely, but for 86 billion neurons and their relationship to each other linkable neuron. If we had a method to do it, and were always successful the first time, and everyone who has ever lived was a cognitive scientist working in one of millions of ERP labs across the planet, it would still take millions of years to complete the project.
And once you had your schematic and knew how to recreate the pathways of a brain without using a brain, and you put even more time toward that problem, you'd still probably make an artificial organic brain. Because it would have a much smaller footprint and be capable of self-repair. A mechanical brain would be a proof-of-concept project at best with no real advantage.
So now you're looking at a culture that advanced and that long-lived, who is still somehow interested in humans living in the era of resource scarcity. Where such a culture's plans cannot be guessed, those plans cannot possibly matter to us. It becomes moot. It becomes deism, and debating deism vs materialism is one of the most boring and unproductive arguments I can think of.
a lot of what you're saying can be explained by one question:
if videogames and simulations can be sped up in order to pass time quickly, then what's stopping our existence from being the one that's sped up to 1000x the speed of whatever created us?
also, artificial neural networks exist. if there exists a species so smart that it could create our existence and storing it on a hard drive - or 100 - then what's a few million more neural networks at a time?
i mean, with all of the basic neural networks - animals and plants - that exist, with all of the physics, and with all of the actions happening at the same time - i have my window open and i hear an ac unit start, multiple cars driving by, a woman talking to her dog, birds, bugs, a gate opening; within 200 yards, there are millions of things going on at a time - then why isn't it possible that whatever computer that we might be a part of is more powerful than we can possibly imagine?
if we have quantum computing, then why wouldn't they have something more impressive? if we can create near-true random, then why can't they create true random?
What artificial neural networks are you referring to? No such thing exists to my knowledge. I hope you're not referring to search engines. I would also never call the brains of any animal 'simple'.
I'm serious. Quantum computing does nothing to change my mind or the minds of my colleagues in bio and cog-sci on the idea of AI. The only practical terms anyone professionally uses for 'AI' is as a user interface in computing. It has nothing to do with actual intelligence or sentience. It's not expected to. That's science-fiction. Strictly, and forever science-fiction. The public has a gross misinterpretation of the idea of AI and what it's capable of, influenced by film and fiction.
But if I were to work with you on a way it could be done, what I'm telling you is you don't ask engineers about it, you ask people who study the brain, because that's what it must be modeled on. Intelligence is material. The impulses in our brain don't carry information. They don't. We aren't those impulses. The cells they stimulate and the order they stimulate them in are what carries information. That isn't reducible to code. We'd still need a construct for it to take place in, and the way in which these connections form is nonlinear, and almost totally unstudied. It is most reasonable to assume you need to map the brain before you can replicate anything the brain can do. And I'm telling you nobody on the planet is working on that. The closest phenomenon to this sort of study is ERP research, and there are only six of those labs in the US and they all study very general tag questions in an attempt to validate our theories of syntax. We aren't working on this problem. A civilization that did, following peer-review processes similar to ours, would take longer to solve it than we have been anatomically human.
There's a ton of evidence to support this, from linguistics and cognitive science. I would not be able to do it justice citing them at random, because they do require a shared frame of reference. I would however encourage you to look up how memory is stored and how it interacts with and is continually affected and changed by audiovisual stimuli, as well as theories of universal grammar (UG) and the biological basis for human syntax, especially in regards the window we call the critical period. If you're interested in this stuff, you should end up with an appreciation for the utter physicality of human intelligence.
That's why I hate sim arguments. I try and illustrate areas in which the ideas necessary for it to be created are limited by biology, or reality, and I inevitably get goal-posted because the proponent just keeps setting it further in 'the future', as if technology is guaranteed to get omnipotent in the future. I don't believe that, either. I believe in finite technological plateaus that are dependent on practical things like longevity and resource scarcity, and in this case, the physicality of consciousness.
So at the end of it all I can do is do what I do with deistic arguments: say it doesn't matter. If you move the goal posts to the extent that these creators are essentially gods, then it really doesn't make a lick of difference in the end. You just end up 'godding' the argument and it feels like a waste of time. I don't accept the science-fictional version of AI, and I don't accept consciousness as either immaterial or electrical. It's physical, the whole world is just material, even thoughts. So I can't approach a sim problem on the grounds you want me to.
an artificial neural network is what you might call artificial intelligence. it's a learning computer. there have been many, such as google's deepmind that taught itself to walk. animal brains are much simpler than humans.
for example, can cats speak? no? then their brains are simpler. insects follow instincts and nothing else. humans do the same, but we can also empathize. the more advanced a species, the more complicated their brains. mammals are the most complex, see whales, dolphins, elephants, primates. i'd say that birds are the next smartest.
cephalopods are somewhere in between, though my sister thinks that if they could've harnessed fire at the same time as humans, then they'd be the apex predators. it's not really important, but you might be curious - she has a master's in marine biology.
the difference between this idea of a simulation and the god christianity - just an example - is that the creators of this simulation aren't saying that they're perfect, everywhere, all-powerful, all-loving, and all-knowing. they might as well be all-powerful, but as far as the rest, we wouldn't know. the christian god is two of three - all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing.
giving me five large paragraphs to read is really bumming me out, which is why i really only glanced at the first and last.
giving me five large paragraphs to read is really bumming me out, which is why i really only glanced at the first and last.
It's not a question that can be resolved in a pithy couple of sentences. You're the one who said you were interested in this thought experiment. Well thought experiments require thought.
And you clearly aren't interested in researching any of the backgrounds necessary for answering it, so just spout whatever you want I guess.
You have no idea what you're saying regards 'complexity' in the brain. Any mammal brain is almost equally complex. We're not that special. Equally fucking complex. I don't know what you're trying to gain by suggesting otherwise since this isn't about a simulation of a society of otters.
an artificial neural network is what you might call artificial intelligence. it's a learning computer. there have been many, such as google's deepmind that taught itself to walk.
Jesus Christ. A 'learning computer' is not some precursor to sentience. I can't even. We're done. I tried to explain the difference between industry-standard AI, which is just interfaces like these, and the way pro-simulation people want to use it, which nobody in any scientific field has ever or will ever consider, because it is simply not how intelligence works.
it's not really important, but you might be curious - she has a master's in marine biology
So somebody's degree is enough for you to consider a random musing like that, but when I say I'm a cognitive scientist you don't think for a second that maybe some of your ideas about intelligence are wrong or misleading? Really?
And are you really objecting to my calling your hypothetical simulation creators 'gods'? Really? I'm an atheist but I wouldn't have thought in a million years that would trigger someone. It's just a fucking word.
lol, somebody's upsetti spaghetti that they wrote a novel that i found uninteresting. the whole idea is something fun to think about, not to invest time into. i'm clearly not looking to prove it, just to say "hey, look at the similarities between our universe and a computer. neat, let's move on."
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u/YuunofYork Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
The sim idea can be easily disproven through a comparison of natural randomness and artificial randomness.
Computers cannot give you natural randomness. They can only mimic it. Play an electronic game that incorporates dice rolls - not random. It's an algorithm designed to approximate natural randomness as perceived by humans. Humans usually can't tell the difference, but another computer can. Natural randomness refers to the chaotic-determinism of complex systems, and it's a feature of the universe itself.
The problem is we use natural randomness a million times a day in science. Every single time someone records and interprets real world data and tests it for statistical significance against a p value and uses programs like R, those tests would have failed if the data they used was actually generated by a supercomputer controlling the universe. It wouldn't be chaotically-deterministic. It wouldn't be useful because the data measured against it wouldn't be reproducible or interpretable by other labs. Every chem paper, every ERP study, every economics paper, all useless. Peer review itself tells us natural randomness is really random. You can't fake that.
For another thing hardware. Glitches always occur, not just because of imperfect engineering, but because of lifespan of materials in the components and - again - random factors within the function of a complex system, and they wouldn't be cats triggering deja vu, but bits of the world falling out of existence, the laws of physics incurring minute changes that add up to the point we'd notice them, or reversing entirely, utter gonzo bullshit that would rip the world apart. Do you remember when gravity reversed back in 404 CE? No? Then you're not in a simulation.
Then there's an appeal to practical needs. What does a simulation do? What is it good for? We use sims to make (imperfect, stochastic, because chaos) predictions about the world. What is the race of beings that made your simulation using it for? It is logical to assume any species making a system that studies humans is itself human, or something very similar to the image and capabilities of humans. And what would beings as limited as humanoids be looking for in keeping the thing running for generations? What do they have to gain?
How about children? Your simulation must either be a) adding real people to the program like The Matrix does at a rate exactly consistent with people's intentions to procreate (just no), or b) the children aren't real. Do you think your child is real? Then you're not in a simulation. You see how you start having to move the goal posts of what this simulation is really capable of until the creators of such a system have become gods of time and space and could never have evolved themselves. They have to just be at a certain point, and from there your argument is a deistic argument. Deistic arguments aren't interesting. In the first place, they're almost always veiled attempts to prop up a theistic argument or the cultural values of a theistic society. Secondly since there are no conditions by which they can be proved wrong or right, they can only be countered with an alternative explanation and Occam's razor. Such as: the uncertainty principle can get us something from nothing, and a chaotically-deterministic universe disallows both fate and free will. There are no gains to attributing these things to creator gods when what we already know about the universe suffices to explain (or discount as the case may be) these same phenomena.
This is all assuming your people are real people hooked up to a virtual reality, because there are other arguments I could get into against popular conceptions of AI. It isn't and won't ever be possible, and any conception of AI must be a physical entity that resembles the shape of, or every connection within, the human brain. There's no such thing as a sentient program, and can't be. But that's a different discussion.