#userdel -r palin.s.AK.USA
The OPs premise is basically the stuff of stoner nerd philosophy. It is not more or less resolvable than any other discussions about God or religeon or higher planes of existance. And it wasn’t even original when the Matrix came out.
But assuming it were true. How would one prove it since your entire perception of reality is defined by the simulation? You can just bust open a wall and find a film crew or a bunch of developers there.
That should work too, but very, very slowly.
The same way a mass of water, carbon compounds and electricity can; organization.
No; the one engaging in woo-woo here is you not me; you are pushing a form of vitalism.
How is it a “bold claim” that we understand “much more” than 2000 years ago, when we knew essentially nothing? You want a cite? All of neuroscience and psychology, to start. I know much more than the people of 2000 years ago knew, much less what science as a whole knows.
And a sentient computer could say that there’s no reason to think that lumps of meat like us are capable of real consciousness, and we’re clearly just showing the appearance of actual awareness and feelings.
I assume it would sustain a conscious mind because that pattern of information is what creates a conscious mind, as demonstrated by us.
Obligatory comic: http://xkcd.com/505/
How is mental illness explained in this simulation? Bad math? I would think that in such an advanced computer, 2+2 always equals four.
An accurate simulation of a human mind would by definition be capable of mental illness. And assuming that this scenario is true, it’s obvious that the builders of the simulation aren’t especially benevolent. If they didn’t edit out cancer, why would they edit out mental illness?
Even granted that someday we’ll be able to produce computer games indistinguishable from reality, why would we? Nobody wants a computer game indistinguishable from reality. If I wanted that, I’d just step outside.
But back to your question, if we are inside a simulation, then either it’s impossible to hack reality, or trivially easy to do so, depending on your definitions. Despite what Morpheus told Neo, a computer system follows absolute rules, and the rules of a computer system can never be broken. What folks call “hacking” is not people breaking the rules of a computer system; rather, it’s people discovering that the absolute rules which govern the system are not precisely what they had previously been assumed to be. And in our world which is, for the sake of argument, a simulation, those absolute rules are the laws of physics. So “hacking reality” would just mean coming to a greater understanding or application of the laws of physics.
Sex leaps immediately to mind.
Nah, I can already get turned down by a wide assortment of hot women in the real world. Why would I want to log in to a game where I could get turned down by virtual hotties, too?
Unless you’re stipulating that the computer game hotties would be so horny they’d be jumping on anything that moves, but such a world would be far from a perfect simulation of reality.
In fact, one might argue that the relative lack of horny hotties is evidence against our world being such a simulation. After all, how many people in the world we experience look like this?
Again, I see a lack of imagination. If our reality is a simulation, who can say what the designers are like? Why assume that they are humans with minds like our own? They could be truly alien operating on principles incomprehensible to us.
Well; for a society capable of building such a simulation, I doubt daily life would look much like what we have. Still; for a game I’d expect more excitement and less dullness and yuckiness.
More like figuring out or at least exploiting the deeper functions that outline what are supposed to be the laws of physics. Really, it would likely work more like magic; such as discovering a bug in the system that if you make a circle of pure diamond rods of just the right length the system will glitch and erase whatever is inside. It would be like discovering exploits in an actual game where the rules break due to a design defect.
If a circle of diamond rods arranged just so caused things inside to be erased, then that would certainly mean that what we currently know of the laws of physics is horribly flawed. But we would then start studying the properties of diamond-rod rings, and figure out what arrangements result in what effects and so on, and work out the laws that really do apply to diamond rods, and learn new laws of physics. In short, the laws of physics, by definition, cannot be wrong, but our understanding of those laws can be.
The universe seems not ontological enough for this hypothesis to make sense. It is certainly possible that all we ‘really’ are is bits in a cosmic server, but since we act like we’re real from our perspective, we’re real. Come back when you actually do find the console commands for reality.
You are still thinking in naturalistic, real-world terms. In this case, the erasure isn’t being cause by the laws of physics, but by a bug in the software that is simulating laws of physics. And the laws of physics can be wrong, or violated in this scenario because unlike real world physics they are defined by something external. In other words, if we are in a simulation they aren’t really laws at all, but arbitrary rules.
What do we know about consciousness now that we didn’t know 2000 years ago? And please don’t respond with what we have learned about neurology and psychology. I want to know what we now understand about consciousness that we didn’t know 2000 years ago.
What is the evidence that a good enough simulation WOULD create a conscious mind? You’re straying dangerously close to the “asking your opponents to prove a negative” fallacious line of reasoning, so please enlighten us. The evidence that a good enough simulation brings forth consciousness is… ?
I’m sorry, I don’t think you’ve escaped the woo woo.
There is the possibility that there really is no disagreement – if by “computer,” etc., you are talking about something so bizarrely different from today’s most advanced theoretical concept of a computer as to be akin to comparing Og banging rocks together with a nuclear power plant, then we’re fairly in agreement. Still in woo woo land, but in agreement.
But then again, if you want to maintain the same sophomoric simplicity of the intelligent designers (yet from a different angle) and claim that consciousness is really just a matter of being able to afford that really big Radio Shack Electronics Lab (the one with the light, voltmeter, photovoltaic cell and a few million miles of wire), then I think you’re the one making the extraordinary claim. Just claiming it’s obvious doesn’t relieve you of the burden of saying why the expression “five times four,” repeated a mazillion times with a jubtillion small variations equals consciousness. It doesn’t relieve you of the burden of saying where the non-conscious/conscious line is.
You’ve also taken on something of a burden by claiming we understand consciousness to any degree whatsoever. Again, separate out grossly rudimentary biochemical processes we’ve recorded and focus on consciousness. Is a frog conscious? Can you prove it? What about a comatose frog? Is pointing to a handful of electromagnetic readings the definition of consciousness? Again, I daresay we’re in the same sophomoric drivel as any other woo woo story you want to tell. It’s turtles all the way down!
Not that I’m inclined towards nihilism or related ilk. Just that I find claims that just because we can get a really really glorified set of Christmas lights to upstage the neighbors means that someday the pretty lights will have a consciousness patently absurd woo woo. It’s woo woo because though there are lots of helpful analogies to be drawn between a brain and a computer, they break down faster than you can say neural network.
It’s woo woo because the magik step you need to add is the closing of our eyes and just wanting it bad enough. Take away the doe-eyed wish and you’ve got a giant cost-accounting spreadsheet. Add the wish back in (the wish that what you are modeling is consciousness), and woo woo ensues.
So, basically you want me to explain what we’ve learned about consciousness without actually mentioning what we’ve learned about consciousness?
Still; a random example; voluntary actions are actually initiated before the conscious mind becomes aware of them. We didn’t know that 2000 years ago.
That it would duplicate the same patterns of activity that produce consciousness in us. How could it NOT create consciousness? Where is your evidence of magic?
That’s just silly. For a computer as advanced as all that, running a human mind would be utterly trivial. Turning the entire top few miles of a planet into a computer is well within “today’s most advanced theoretical concept of a computer”.
No, the woo-woo here is yours. You are claiming that the mind works on some sort of mystic forces, and that’s as woo woo as you get. There’s exactly zero evidence that the brain is anything other than a really complicated computer; there’s zero evidence for any kind of vitalism. There’s no “life force”; it’s all molecular machinery and electricity between our ears.
Heh, this is basically the concept of Chaos Magick.
The basic premise is that reality is a mental construct, and that we are bound by the rules of the system, being subsets of the system and all, but the reality is that everything is drawn from the chaos, from the void, that all actions are acts of pure will.
The way it was developed was that it took a post-modern approach to magickal systems. It recognized all magick systems as being equally relevant because it was the act of will that caused the effects, the adherence to ritual being a method of focus, basically a magickal ritual is a container intended to bottle intent and then release it based upon the design of the intended effect. The more intent someone gives something, the more seriously they take it, the more they focus on it, the more likely it is to be realized.
The understanding of the world comes in handy in that it allows you to understand the medium you are working with. Like any artist the Chaos Magician is bound by his medium, his creative process is both restricted and freed by result of the medium. In this case the medium is reality.
If you’ve ever seen the term, ‘fnord’, it describes precisely what you are talking about. It is a mocking term invented for the Illuminatus! Trilogy IIRC. Basically it is a fear subroutine that is meant to trigger a casual dread on the part of the reader. The implication is that it appears in newspapers all the time and whenever the leaders want you to be afraid of such and such they put fnord into the article in order to convey some kind of vague malevolent dread regarding that subject. We are trained to both ignore that we even saw the word fnord and to become subconsciously disquieted and associate it with the topic. While it’s a joke, it is neurologically sound.
When you go into your office, look around your office, look for things that you’ve never paid attention to before, details. Read every poster you come across. Try to find something that has clearly been there for a very long time but you never realized it was there. The reason for this is that the mind is meant to respond to changes in the environment. If something is basic and normal and your mind has already deemed it inconsequential, you won’t even notice it.
Robert Anton Wilson is a good author if you are exploring this kind of idea. He propounds a radical agnosticism. That is not that he does or not believe in God, it is that he does not believe in, ‘anything’. He uses a series of charming anecdotes and appeals to neuropsychology to make his case. ‘Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati’, is where he explains his basic thesis, it’s a quick read.
I am actually afraid of that notion. If the NPCs ever figured out the true level of our contempt for them they might revolt.
It’s always interesting to me that when people think of a more advanced reality this is what they think of, just more advanced versions of what we already have.
Why not beings that exist without form who create subsets where they can model interaction? The entire notion of ‘faster than light’, being only relevant within the system where the velocity of a photon is relevant let alone such a primitive conveyance as a flying car.
Scylla I’ve always found it interesting that Matrix (womb) and Material both share the same root, “Mother”, and that the concept of physical reality being the feminine principle with spirit being the male principle is pretty commonly found amongst various traditions throughout history.