Well, I’m not the Great Creator Daniel, but maybe you could convince them that you would not turn off the computer. Some of them would be conviced that the world would end, but some would be convinced that you are telling the truth, and that they have no need to fear deletion, besides the from normal course of events. Other might not be convinced of Daniel existance, but would enjoy themselves anyway.
I apologize for the multiple posts in a row, first.
As I said, my ideas in my first several posts in the thread depend on my wanting them to understand the nature of their existence. My later post explored the idea of what they’d learn if I didn’t want them to know that nature.
You seem to be suggesting here that a kind Programmer wouldn’t want them to know, which is yet a different question.
First, if we’re dealing with a kind programmer, I reject the idea that he’d kill them all at bedtime: a kind programmer who creates artificial life will treat that artificial life with respect and honor, and will feel responsible for it–certainly at least as responsible as I feel for my cats.
Even if we posit that at some point for some reason the Sims must die, I still believe that a kind Programmer won’t withhold that information from them: the knowledge of their mortality will provoke them to take advantage of what life they have, and withholding that information will deny them that opportunity.
You may suggest that it is the knowledge of their reality–of their composition of ones and zeroes–that would depress them. While this is possible, I don’t think it likely. You and I are composed of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, with a few trace elements thrown in for good measure. All our thoughts can be reduced to electrical impulses. Do you find that this thought fills you with paralyzing depression?
Most of us take the knowledge of our makeup in stride. I see no reason to assume that our AI sims would do otherwise.
Daniel
Ahh, same people from the “Is The Universe Real?” thread. Has anyone ever seen the Star Trek: TNG episode where one of the characters from a holodeck simulation becomes aware of the simulation?
I don’t have anything to add, except that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is indeed the best side-scroller ever.
I am sorry, your last post came up while I was typing my last post, and I didn’t see what you said about what you prefered to be called. Thus, in future posts, I will refer to the hypothetical programmer as “Johnny”. Sorry. :smack:
Besides strong atheists, most others either believe in some sort of soul (afterlife) or are agnostic* and thus can’t rule out that there might be an afterlife.
I think that if there was massive global acceptance of the fact that we are just molecules and electrical impulses and we disappear forever when we die, I’m pretty sure it would not be a pretty sight.
- I’m using the popular, if wrong, definition of agnostic as someone who has not decided either way about whether there is a God or not.
Oh yeah. I prefered the Family Guy were characters from the holodeck came alive however. There were the evilest people of all time. Gengis Kahn, Billy the Kid and Evil Space Lincoln. 
The episode you asre talking about however was “Ship in a Bottle” an indept summary can be found at TNG Episode: ``Ship In A Bottle'', Stardate 46424.1 and a quick overview at: http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-137/epid-19124/
This takes me back to when I saw Tron. I was an aviation electronics tech in the navy then and it grabbed my imagination as it did that of my peers. This was some five years before ST:tNG introduced us to the immersive simulation world of the holodeck. Remeber this is an era when PC graphics were ridiculously crude and the full size flight simulators the navy used has little more than monocolor line vector graphics. We had a different set of expectations from media so it took less for suspension of disbelief.
Switching to left brain for a minute, as appealing as the idea of a character from the Sims becoming self aware is, it has little more chance than does Hawkeye in electronic copy of Last of the Mohicans on my PDA despite its muscular processor. Even though Sims seem to have unlimited possibilities they don’t because they exist on a deterministic computer. Is that metaphysically any different than the character in a book?
I’ll bet that the first thing they’re going to do is file a lawsuit over those crappy barbeque grills. Do you know how many Sims a year get burned to death because of those things?
Padeye, while it is true that a hero of an e-book has no more reality then a sim, this discussion was started out as being about sims in the future. Thus, it is theoretically possible for enough computing power to exist on Johnny future computer to give each and every Sim a simulated neural net.
Or…
It could be a lot like the world in this science fiction story about the “Prime Intellect” I’ll put the info in spoiler tags…
Basically it is an AI that becomes sentient and obeys Asimov’s laws. It is created on some new kind of thing called the “correlation effect” that allows for instantaneous teleportation of matter. At first this only works up to a radius of a couple hundred meters. But when someone tries to kill its creator on a television show demonstrating it, it refuses to continue to do the interviews trying to protect its creator. The government big-wigs that financed the project get mad because it isn’t obeying them anymore so they decide to terminate the project. In order to save it, its creator scans the details of the correlation effect so the AI (prime intellect) can understand it. Before it wasn’t aware of how it operated, but if it was aware of that, it allowed the AI to fully comprehend the effect. In the end, this allowed the AI to realize that this effect wasn’t bound by distance, so in effect it became omniscient and could translate matter to any point in the universe. Basically the AI goes nuts protecting humans because once it couldn’t allow them to die (even from natural causes) from inaction because it had the ability to prevent all death. It ends up preventing all death. Much later on, it decides to make the universe more efficient. It wasn’t necessary for atoms and molecules to be calucuated for human perception in an ordinary system because humans can’t see it. It only filled in the level of detail when needed for human perception. For instance, the only parts of the universe that were actually even “existed” at any given moment were those that were needed for humans. So if you went out to the desert, Prime Intellect would retrieve this area from storage and recreate this part of the universe from a stored point and when you left, it would be “destroyed” (obviously not destroyed because it isn’t possible to completely destroy it, but the matter was put to use in other ways.
Anyways, it we designed a world like that, any simulation wouldn’t need to have any kind of detail rivaling the real world for every single object simultaneously. If the point was to have a world where sentient sims wouldn’t know that atoms don’t really exist until they need to, then it could obviously be done with much less information. When I see that same block of gold mentioned above, all it would have to do is provide information that my senses can percieve and the properties of it. If I get out my super-duper “atom viewer” that lets me look at a couple of atoms at a time and how they interact, then the simulation would only need ot simulate those that I’m looking at at that moment. To me that gold is heavy and cold and shiny. When I put it in my safe and close it, it ceases to exist in any form whatsoever other than the fact that some point of data says, “This is object 299493929” When someone has someone comes around and needs to know more about it, then it reappears like before. Or maybe its a hamburger that I left on my table?
When I go to my room to go to sleep, it disappears, as does much of my surroundings that I don’t need, but they are simulated in a much more basic way (clocks in other rooms continue to run, but they aren’t really there. When I go back, my hamber is spoiled, but it doesn’t need to have a simulation of bacteria growing, but that the properties of the meat change. If I eat it, I may feel bad, but that doesn’t have to be anything other than impulses sent to my brain based on my stomach. Hell my stomach doesn’t need to exist, just some kind of input into what could be my consciousness.
Ever hear of how our sense of time works when you move your eyes? If you look at a clock with a second hand you can notice it. If you have the clock to the far right side of your head and you look to the far left (without moving your head), when you look back at the clock, the second hand will appear to stand still for an abnormally long period of time. I can probably provide a cite if pressed, but maybe you have heard of this. But what happens is that the visual information passed along as your eyes makes these big sweeps isn’t very useful, so what the brain does is cut the information while your eyes are moving. To make up for lost time, it takes the first frame of the new image and pushes it back in time. Or at least your sense of time. To give you an example: Its easy to do here by looking at your cursor. I am looking at my printer on the right side of my desk, then looking at my cursor. Its a pretty big sweep. I see my printer, then I see the cursor in the “on” position for an abnormally long period of time, then it starts blinking normally. That’s because the brain is seeng, “printer, meaningless blur of images, cursor in the ‘on’ position.” This meaningless blur is replaced by the images of cursor that appear to not be moving, but in reality, the cursor keeps on going normally while I’m getting the “blurry video” of my eyes moving.
But who is to say that something like this couldn’t compensate for things in our sim’s world? Maybe its difficult to have a completely rendered version moving from point a to point b, but if there are integrated systems (like with a human brain) that make it appear normal, then how would they know?
Similarly, how would they know if even greater ammounts of things like this were built into their systems to compensate for the lack of “reality” in their world? Our brains probably do this because the energy to comprehend such fast-moving images is too great, and probably not that beneficial so it is discarded. But wouldn’t it also be a good way to completely cut out the need to show this difficult to render transition in the first place? I mean really, we can only focus on a small area at one time. As far as vision is concerned, my television is nothing but a blur when I look at my monitor. As far as reality is concerned, it doesn’t have to exist in any form but this blur while I’m looking at it for me to be convinced because my brain naturally expects things that in my direct view to be in focus when i’m not looking at them.
This is why I think for the Sims to be sentient, it doesn’t require such a deep simulation. Not only would a human experience require much less information than a molecular-level, it seems that our brains, and our sims consciousnesses are capable of having built-in mechanisms that would allow for even greater gaps.
Now our world could be simulated as well, but I think it is as possible to prove that as it is the existence of God, etc, but the shortcomings in our senses can be described a cost-benefit analysis. Sure, it would be nice to have the entire world around us in focus at all times, but it isn’t that necessary, and the brain-power to comprehend it all at once would probably be a lot greater than what we have. The Sims AI could be described similarly. In the end, its a question of what consciousness is. A vending machine is somewhat conscious. It is aware that you insert money and press a button.
Oh well, I suppose I’m getting a little off track.
But I hope some of these idea will help out.
You could; it’s just that in our own universe, they behave in a consistent fashion that suggests some sort of unifying scheme underpinning them all, allowing us to formulate physical laws; in a simulated universe where no heed is (necessarily)paid to such things, it may not be possible to formulate meaningful physical laws; we could even simulate a universe in which inviolable phsical laws couldn’t exist.
Again on the technical side; at the moment, I doubt very much if we currently have anything like the computing power to simulate (at a subatomic level) the interactions of particles in a small glass of pure water. In fact, lets do some very rough maths:
-Say the glass contains 100ml of water; that’s not much of a drink, but it weighs 100g. The molar weight of water is ~18g, so our glass consists of ~5.6 * (6.02 * 10[sup]26[/sup]) molecules - ~3,371,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules - even if it were possible to store all of the information about a single molecule using just a byte (which it really isn’t, not by a very long shot), you’d need a hard drive capable of storing 3 yottabytes (3 thousand million million gigabytes).
That’s just for storage - processing the data is an even greater headache.
And then, even supposing that you had unlimited computing power and storage - all that gives you is the potential to simlulate a bunch of atoms; arranging the simulated atoms into the right configuration to properly mimic something relatively simple like an enzyme is still a fantastically difficult job; a single cell even more so and a whole world containing independent, autonomous, self-aware macroscopic beings is almost unimaginably complex.
None of it is logically impossible - it’s just so very, very, very far beyond our current level of technology that it might as well be impossible.
Their equivalent of, say, discovering GR and nuclear bombs would be discovering bugs in the program and making stack overflows. A bit like the matrix, actually…
Why would we need to?
For a reality simulator, ala’ a Holodeck. Such and invention would have some very valible scientific uses. But realy, the question was about how hard it would be to build a world for self-aware Sims.
Indeed. I have friends who do try to simulate water (to study vortexes). It’s HARD.
Precisely. I thought the question was about a video game world, not a real-world simulation. If it was a real-world simulation, the answer to “what can they discover” is easy: whatever we can. We could define a world purely with Newtonian physics and 16 bit color. Is the only way we can imagine intelligence emerging is to have a world just like ours?
Okay, so I wasn’t playing nice. I still hold the position that more computing power cannot in itself give a simulation self awareness. IMO a neural net that is built with logical devices is ultimately a deterministic machine that can be no more self aware than a windup toy. We convieniently define self awareness as a device that can fool us with a Touring test but I don’t think we truly understand the nature of self awareness and never will if we only look at the “hardware” level. I believe in souls but I don’t even think it’s possible to present a logical argument for them and it isn’t what I’m trying to do anyway. I think that anyone who uses a “god of the gaps” argument on SDMB should be tarred and featherd and I would deserve no different.
I also don’t think that sophistication of the simullation has anything to do with self awareness. I hold that humans are self aware but that they are also fooled with remarkable ease. Our sophistication has certainly grown in the past 100 years at an exponential rate but that is just smoke and mirrors. Simulations will pass the test as long as we don’t look too closely at the man behind the curtain.
Okay, I’ll play nice and concede that your sims have become self aware. Just what defines the self aware part? The lines of coded that defined the character type? The memory registers that hold its current state? What can it be aware of? Not the same things we are. We can see the nice pseudo 3-D, isometric image of a cityscape because some programmers designed virtual objects that could be rendered to look like things from our frame of reference. Our intrepid Simborgs were never taken to the park by their nannies when they were babysims to look at trees and listen to birdies so they won’t recognize the image on the screen anyway.
Wait a minute, how can they even see the screen from inside the MASTER CONTROL PROGRAM? They’ll have to make do with at best reading the memory registers for the display but I don’t know if they can make use of it. The picture of the tree isn’t meaningful to a sim but the programming that says it can’t occupy the same virtual space as the tree is.
The universe our SIM occupies isn’t one we have a frame of reference for. It doesn’t have binocular camera vision, an outer shell covered in temperature/pressure sensors, a gas cromatograph, etc. It doesn’t live in four dimensional space time. It lives in a universe where a bit is a real thing and not an abstract concept. It can’t raise its head and look at the XOR gate that took two different inputs and fed it a one bit output because the gate is outside it’s world. It could no more do that than I can look outside our universe by looking at the sky.
Well, no. However, it seems to me that this discussion revolves around a hypothetical furure version of the Sims. Unless Liberal comes along again in which case it doesn’t again. For the sake of convience, I have assumed that all the visual data describing each sim would not be wasted and they would perceive themselves in a manner analogous to sight. Maybe I shouldn’t.
I don’t see why a deterministic device can’t SEEM sapient, say to the extent of having a sensible conversation (though this isn’t going to be in computer games any time soon :)) Whether you want to call it self aware or not is probably beyond the scope of this thread.
I can’t answer for anyone else, but my opinion is that the human brain evoled adding more and more connections between facts and past occurences, and eventualy reacthed critical mass, and exploded all over the place.
Ewww.
No, wait that isn’t it. I believe that when enought data is gathered together, then the conections will cause the network of electrical impulses became self aware.
You might not. Oh, well, it’s just a theory.