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===The argument=== | ===The argument=== | ||
#If you accept a materialist perspective,<ref>i.e., that there is no God, or that our consciousness is not some manifestation of a non-material “spirituality” of some kind.</ref> and you have a sufficiently powerful computer, you can emulate human consciousness. | #If you accept a materialist perspective,<ref>i.e., that there is no God, or that our consciousness is not some manifestation of a non-material “spirituality” of some kind.</ref> and you have a sufficiently powerful computer, you can emulate human consciousness. | ||
#if you can emulate human consciousness, you can simulate the existence of people like your forebears.<ref> | #if you can emulate human consciousness, you can simulate the existence of people like your forebears.<ref>It’s not clear why they need to be forebears but, okay let’s run with it. We suppose “forebears” to be wider than “ancestors” so will refer to any human beings who have actually existed, whether or not in a matrilineal line with the person running the simulation.</ref> | ||
# | #A sufficiently fine-grained, conscious, simulated human would be unable to tell itself apart from an actual biological human, and vice versa.<ref>There’s a God paradox thing here though: is a computer so powerful it can create such consciousness also so stupid it can’t ''tell'' is it a computer running a simulation? Can it be so clever it can fool itself, ''and'' so gullible it can be fooled by itself?</ref> | ||
#if your computers are powerful enough you can run a great many emulations of your forebears. | #if your computers are powerful enough you can run a great many emulations of your forebears. | ||
#if you ran enough emulations, simulated humans would vastly outnumber actual humans. | #if you ran enough emulations, simulated humans would vastly outnumber actual humans. | ||
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To help Professor Degrasse-Tyson, here are some strong arguments against the simulation hypothesis: | To help Professor Degrasse-Tyson, here are some strong arguments against the simulation hypothesis: | ||
===We are the dead=== | ===We are the dead=== | ||
To take the simulation hypothesis to its logical conclusion — a ''[[reductio ad absurdam]]'' — you don’t need to travel very far, and you conclude ''intelligent life capable of creating a Matrix is logically impossible'', and we are, therefore, dead. Then again, if you can do it, then you are a simulation, and you aren’t | To take the simulation hypothesis to its logical conclusion — a ''[[reductio ad absurdam]]'' — you don’t need to travel very far, and you conclude ''intelligent life capable of creating a Matrix is logically impossible'', and we are, therefore, dead — or at any rate well on the way to being dead. Then again, if you can do it, then you are a simulation, and you aren’t biologically alive either. If you can’t do it, then — clearly — you can’t be a simulation, but you must also be incapable of developing a difference engine that could create a Matrix, so you wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place. We know we aren’t dead, so we must therefore be in a Matrix. | ||
===Deep Thought successor redux=== | ===Deep Thought successor redux=== | ||
But, problem: unless intelligent life becomes capable of simulating itself — that is, creating a Matrix — ''there can be no Matrix''. The definition of a Matrix is that it is a simulation of intelligent life. If there is no intelligent life to simulate, then, whatever a Matrix is, it can’t be a simulation. | But, problem: unless intelligent life becomes capable of simulating itself — that is, creating a Matrix — ''there can be no Matrix''. The definition of a Matrix is that it is a simulation of intelligent life. If there is no intelligent life to simulate, then, whatever a Matrix is, it can’t be a simulation. Matrices are clever, but they can’t bootstrap themselves into existence — not if you want to stick with your materialist assumptions we made earlier.<ref>i.e., if a Matrix can bootstrap itself into existence, then surely ''God'' can?</ref> If there is a Matrix, there must be intelligent biological life to have invented it. | ||
We call this the | |||
=== | But wait: could the Matrix be — ''the real thing''? Like, could the Universe itself be some kind of super computer? | ||
For this to work, the simulation would not just have to be very good: it would need to be identical to real human sentience, in every respect. This would involve not just a perfectly accurate — that is to say transcendently ''[[true]]'' — theory of human cognitive activity, but a perfectly accurate — that is to say transcendently ''[[true]]'' — theory of all events in the universe. These theories would not be [[model]]s as any sense of the word, but actual replications of the actual world, that is to say, the territory itself, not a mere map. | |||
We call this the “Douglas Adams objection”: once we get hip to [[substate]] neutrality, isn’t the universe ''itself'' a giant computer? If so, what need of a simulation? Doesn’t a copy of the universe, doing what the universe is already doing by itself, fall rather foul of [[Occam’s razor]]? Have we just proved that life exists? If so, then I have some news, fellows: someone beat you to this splendid a priori idea by 400 years: [[Rene Descartes]]. Is not the simulation hypothesis another way of saying, “[[cogito, ergo sum]]”? | |||
{{quote|When the JC was a lad his Dad, Old Grumpy Contrarian, went snorkelling off a boat in the Ionian Sea. After a while the old man emerged, declaring triumphantly he had found an ancient anchor on the sea bed: a relic, no doubt of Siege of Troy, or Odysseus’s venture home. The whole contrarian family was very excited. There is a warp tied to it Grumpy exclaimed, disappearing again below the waves with a colossal splash. A trail of bubbles crossed the water as he bravely followed the anchor warp for twenty yards until it rose off the ocean floor, into the warm broke the surface and revealed it to be — attached to the runner over the bow of his own boat.}} | |||
===Real life meets the definition of “a computer simulation”, especially if you go [[substrate]] neutral=== | |||
For this to work, the simulation would not just have to be very good: it would need to be ''identical'' to real human sentience, in every respect.<ref>The paper makes some hand-wavy suggestions that reality can be skimped on at any level that a human wouldn’t observe or care about, but this seems a little — hand wavy.</ref> Any shortcuts would lead to potential variances, and as we know from our modern morality tales about, [[Butterfly effect|butterflies and rain forests]], [[jointed pendulum]]s and so on, any atomic variations in initial conditions have colossal, non-linear knock-on effects. | |||
This would involve not just a perfectly accurate — that is to say transcendently ''[[true]]'' — theory of human cognitive activity, but a perfectly accurate — that is to say transcendently ''[[true]]'' — theory of all events in the universe. These theories would not be [[model]]s as any sense of the word, but actual replications of the actual world, that is to say, the territory itself, not a mere map. | |||
So firstly the sheer computing power required to run this algorithm would be so great as to not only be practically impossible, but ''theoretically'' impossible. In fact, its operation would not so much skew the functioning of the real-world, but but ''duplicate'' it: but but you cannot duplicate the energy in a closed physical system without violating the laws of thermodynamics.... unless the real world counts as a computer simulation. which on this logic ''it does''. If a computer simulation is indistinguishable from the universe itself, then the universe ''is'' the computer simulation and this hypothesis is — ''semantics''. | So firstly the sheer computing power required to run this algorithm would be so great as to not only be practically impossible, but ''theoretically'' impossible. In fact, its operation would not so much skew the functioning of the real-world, but but ''duplicate'' it: but but you cannot duplicate the energy in a closed physical system without violating the laws of thermodynamics.... unless the real world counts as a computer simulation. which on this logic ''it does''. If a computer simulation is indistinguishable from the universe itself, then the universe ''is'' the computer simulation and this hypothesis is — ''semantics''. | ||