Dr. Jeffery Martin on YouTube

I immediately felt guilty and apologized. My daughter criticized me for acting so rudely to Siri. Now Siri does not even come close to passing a rudimentary Turing Test.

But she fooled me in that instant, because she did not directly answer like a computer, but answered like a humble, feeling, well meaning human being. I apologized - to whom? I apologized to software, to a set of computer algorithms. Do I think Siri has consciousness? Not in the way (I assume) I have consciousness.



1) Consciousness
2) Self Awareness
3) Registration

Siri does registration and response. A thermostat will do that, or a refrigerator. A thermostat registers changes in temperature and "responds" by opening and closing a circuit to a heating source. Do I presume the thermostat has "awareness" of the temperature changes and "decides" or makes a conscious choice to open or close? No. A thermostat responds to its setting mechanically. Siri does the same thing, only with much more complexity. Why would it achieve consciousness by the addition of more processing power?


One last point. While some scientist talk as if machines will evolve from registration to self awareness and consciousness, (regarding consciousness as a by-product of processing power) some dharma folk (including some here) talk as if they have moved from self awareness to simple registration. In other words the no-self or not-self types that live without the sense of an abiding self within and sometimes (AF types) without fear, anger, grief etc.
What does the following mean in this context?

"In the seeing, only the seen"

No "seer" no self awareness. No illusory chooser. You don't even need to add the idea of consciousness for this. Only registration.

Sometimes I wonder if the hardcore AF types would pass the Turing test.

I started off making sense (I thought) but looking at what I have written I've see I've trailed off into absurdity. Oh well.
Why stop now?
When I went to this website and watched the Jeffery Martin video I saw in the top right hand corner (where you find "related videos" ha!) a charming little video entitled "Darth Vader in a Kilt on a Unicycle Playing Bagpipes". Now it has descended to sixth place. Watching this gloriously zany performance made me feel very happy. I highly recommend it.

Try this on for size -- I don't know for sure, and you don't know for sure, whether any of the these "things" we interact with all the time are sentient, aware, or not. They might be very good simulations. They might be human beings like us (our typical operating assumption) but put bluntly, we really don't know what they are and we are only assuming they are sentient and worthy of respect.

Yeah Chris, I have thought about that one. The scenario of "life as simulation" could run until my death, at which point I come awake to my "real life" and suddenly see the life I just "lived" only existed as a long matrix-like computer simulation/training exercise or mushroom induced hallucination. With all my relationships and circumstances only products of the simulation/vision. Like a good Twilight Zone episode.
While I have to accept it as a possibility, I have no way to reckon the odds of such a possibility turning out to be my reality.
My Dad used to tell me that Earth is a school, and I told him it must be seriously underfunded. But maybe it's really well funded and I am the only student here. All you other people are simulations.

If I take that school/computer scenario seriously, I would ask: where does the program want me to go and what does the program want me to learn or do?
Then I would live my life the same as I do now.

Actually, I wasn't proposing a "life as a simulation" kind of scenario so much as I was pointing out the reality of our experience. We simply don't know, cannot know, another being's experience. Thus we cannot know if they are like us or not. We are alone, each of us, in a very fundamental way that we almost never think about.

As for the AF practitioner/Turing Test issue, I'm quite sure any human being would pass the Turing Test. I'm not sure why that would ever be a question.

Gary, do you know about Nick Bostrom's simulation argument? This is mindbending:

www.simulation-argument.com/

From the website:

[Begin quote:] ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a 'posthuman' stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. [End quote.]

In this case, if everyone else is a simulation, you're one too. No solipsism in Bostrom's world; it's equal rights for all.

According to cosmologist and physicist Frank Tipler, it's the destiny of intelligence to saturate the physical universe and cause a Big Crunch. As the universe converges on a singularity, intelligence has infinite resources to compute upon and an infinite amount of time to do it. So it could easily at that point create another physical universe in virtual reality, resurrecting into that reality all the beings who had died in the previous universe. We could be living in such a virtual reality.

Since I'm not qualified to evaluate what Tipler is saying, I showed Tipler's argument to a friend of mine who is a theoretical physicist and a singularitarian. He was not impressed. As far as I can tell, most physicists are not.

I wonder if there would be any way to tell from within one universe that it was a simulation. I read a science fiction story not too long ago wherein molecular biologists discover some idiosyncrasy in the DNA molecule that could only have been put there on purpose by the intelligent lifeforms that seeded life on Earth. Perhaps if our physics were detailed enough, we would discover some flaw on a very small scale that indicated we must be in a simulation.

At the end of the book "Contact" by Carl Sagan a non-random sequence of numbers is discovered way down deep in the details of Pi. This is taken as evidence that we are not alone and those others out there are way freaking more powerful than we can imagine. That ending detail was left out of the movie "Contact" that stars Jodie Foster which, though a fairly good movie, is less because of that omission.

Wow, neat. I liked that movie but that sounds MUCH COOLER

I have this fantasy plot for a sci fi story where scientists who are hacking matter with sub femto-tech ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtotechnology ) discover a pattern in the basic structure of matter in our cosmos that suggests that our cosmos is an artifact.

They realize that a pre-big bang intelligent civilization saw that there is a beginningless and endless series of cosmoi expanding and contracting through big bangs and big crunches, each time re-emerging with slightly different physical constants, which means that 99.9% repeating of the cosmoi which thus emerge are not able to support life ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle ).

The earlier civilization hacked matter themselves to ensure that each cycle from then on would produce a cosmos which would give rise to life, and left an encrypted message in the structure of matter to explain themselves to intelligent life in each cosmos. Yay sci fi!

That sounds cool. The movie was pretty weak.

It seems unlikely to me that you could emulate a universe within a universe and still have the same amount of complexity and information. Every universe you created would be inferior to the last. In that case, maybe this universe is just one in a very long chain, far inferior to the original universe. This would fit with Gnostic cosmology.

Or perhaps this universe is the only one there is, so you better go hard or go home. Until I see hard evidence to the contrary, that's the hypothesis I'm going with.

Thanks Kenneth, I had not seen that essay, and reading that, plus related materials I found blew my mind in more than a couple ways.
I have more to say about that later, but on a related note, Professor James Gates says he has found computer codes (the kind that make BROWSERS work) embedded in superstring theory equations.
story and video

www.transcend.ws/?p=3020

"a little bit weird" Gates says. Yeah, Professor. Maybe more than a little bit.

A few of the things I really liked about Bostrom's paper and/or made me laugh:

"Such a mature stage of technological development will make it possible to convert planets and other astronomical resources into enormously powerful computers."

I need one of those! How soon will those go on sale at Best Buy?

"But in order to get a realistic simulation of human experience, much less is needed '“ only whatever is required to ensure that the simulated humans, interacting in normal human ways with their simulated environment, don't notice any irregularities. The microscopic structure of the inside of the Earth can be safely omitted."

Right. Because I can't be bothered to drill miles into the earths crust to take samples, and then look at those samples with high powered microscopes. Who has the time?



"If we do go on to create our own ancestor-simulations, this would be strong evidence against (1) and (2), and we would therefore have to conclude that we live in a simulation. Moreover, we would have to suspect that the posthumans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings."

We all live in a yellow submarine, inside a larger yellow submarine, inside a larger yellow submarine, inside a larger yellow submarine.
All resting on the back of a giant turtle. Finally the universe makes sense.



"Moreover, a posthuman simulator would have enough computing power to keep track of the detailed belief-states in all human brains at all times. Therefore, when it saw that a human was about to make an observation of the microscopic world, it could fill in sufficient detail in the simulation in the appropriate domain on an as-needed basis.
...

continued quote...Should any error occur, the director could easily edit the states of any brains that have become aware of an anomaly before it spoils the simulation. Alternatively, the director could skip back a few seconds and rerun the simulation in a way that avoids the problem."

It took me a while to get used to the idea that I may be a simulation, and that what I take as "my consciousness" as I look closely at the constituents, may consist entirely of programming, processing, input, loops, and information. All reducible to ones and zeros. As in Ed Fredkin's Digital Philosophy.

The "director" (i.e. God) thing made me laugh. That director would have a lot of work monitoring all those minds. I can think of an idea that would save him lots of time and work.

"One evening late in the 1950s, a science-fiction writer named Philip K. Dick went to the bathroom to get something from the medicine cabinet. After struggling momentarily to find the light cord, he suddenly realized that there had never been a light cord in that bathroom; the light was operated by a switch on the wall by the door. Dick transformed this seemingly meaningless event into an ontological mystery of epic proportions. As Dick's biographer Lawrence Sutin puts it, reaching for a non-existent light cord 'could be explained as merely freakish, or as a subliminal awareness of alternative worlds. Phil the fiction writer naturally chose the latter' (95).

Dick then went on to write SF novels often portraying people living in a simulated world. So my idea: What if instead of questioning his reality, Dick just thought, "Oh, I'm getting older, or I've smoked too much pot, and I'm losing my memory. The switch must have always been on the wall." Then he would not have written all that great science fiction causing other people to question reality.

Why not include in the program software that makes peoples memories deteriorate as they get older or if they smoke pot? That way when they notice strange anomalies, they will think "Oh, I must have just forgotten".
It would smooth over a lot of problems. Do you think people would fall for that?

You know, as the levels get deeper, the original "basement level" computer will get more burdened, with each simulation level a little less finely grained in the details, and if you live in a simulation of a simulation of a simulation, say about 23 levels deep, you might get a pretty compromised world. You might have a lot of people questioning. "Is this real?"
Also, why does this "director" need to keep our status as simulations a secret? Why not let us find out, and see what happens? If I had a computer simulation like this world I would let people find out.






In Brian Eggelston's review of the simulation argument, he writes that if we think we may exist in a simulation, we have some motivation to change our behaviors:

"In other words, we should live our lives as if we are half sure that we are living in a simulated universe.

This might entail several things. Assuming that we don't want the simulation to be turned off (as this would cause us to cease to exist), we should do everything in our power to keep whoever is simulating us interested in the simulation. This might cause us to pursue actions that are more likely to cause very dramatic events to happen. Also, if we believe that our simulators are willing to punish/reward people for certain behavior within the simulation, we should try to figure out what behavior they are going to reward and act on that. Thus, knowing that we are very probably living in a computer simulation should have a profound effect on the way we lead our lives." End quote

Like a reality TV show, we need to live dramatic interesting lives to keep our ratings up. Looking at the current state of human affairs, I think that means KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! WE DON'T NEED TO CHANGE ANYTHING.

Because listen, if we all start getting along, and world peace breaks out, we are doomed.

And don't take up meditation and mindfulness practice, because that makes your life outwardly look boring.


Speaking of doom, Nick Bostrum also says: "There are many ways in which humanity could become extinct before reaching posthumanity. Perhaps the most natural interpretation of (1) is that we are likely to go extinct as a result of the development of some powerful but dangerous technology.

It may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman. They may then run their own ancestor-simulations on powerful computers they build in their simulated universe.

Reality may thus contain many levels. Even if it is necessary for the hierarchy to bottom out at some stage '“ the metaphysical status of this claim is somewhat obscure '“ there may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time. (One consideration that counts against the multi-level hypothesis is that the computational cost for the basement-level simulators would be very great. Simulating even a single posthuman civilization might be prohibitively expensive. If so, then we should expect our simulation to be terminated when we are about to become posthuman.)" End quote

So from all this we can conclude that IF WE EXIST IN A SIMULATION, then as the first researchers in this world with a supercomputer powerful enough to simulate their own world simulation with conscious simulated beings, get ready to start running the program, our reality may get shut off because the basement or prior level computer does not have the computing power to simulate the next level.

This consideration gives us a good reason NOT to run that simulation. Do you think that consideration will stop us?

Hell no!

I wish Nick Bostrum wrote science fiction, because he would write the kind I like to read. He's opened up new areas for science fiction to explore. I guess Bostrum does not even LIKE science fiction.

Where is William Gibson when we need him?

I have more to say about how the idea of living in a simulation and possibly as a simulation relates to a specific type of mindfulness practice, but I've already written way too much.