Simulating Consciousness

Is this base reality or could we be living in a simulation? That’s a question that is gaining some momentum recently. Elon Musk touched on it last week but he’s not the first to postulate this theory, Nick Bostrom wrote a paper on it 15 years ago in 2001 and Iain M. Banks investigated it extensively in his novels, most notably in The Hydrogen Sonata, and the film The Matrix revolved around the concept.o-THE-MATRIX-AND-HINDUISM-facebook

How far flung is the idea that we could be living in a simulated environment? It turns out that it’s perhaps not as distant as you might initially expect.

How would we know if we were living in a simulation? Our brain is an interpreter of signals and those signals come from our senses – sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell at a minimum. But how do we know that those senses are not being simulated and those signals that we are interpreting are not actually being generated by a program?

This sounds like the stuff of science fiction, and it is and has been, but the question is particularly valid as we are now poised on the brink of Virtual Reality and the answer could be disturbing. There is no way to know if we’re in the ‘real’ because all of our information comes from senses that may be compromised; we only know what they bring us, no more. Our reality is just the interpretation of those signals.

We are almost at a point where we can make computer simulations that are photo-realistic and three dimensional in appearance. In 35 years we have gone from 3D Monster Maze, the first three dimensional game played on the Sinclair ZX81 to No Man’s Sky, a simulation of space no-mans-sky-screenshot-02_1920.0.0exploration so large that every player in the multiplayer universe starts on their own planet which they can fully explore before leaving and exploring other planets in other systems light years distant. The developers have stated that it is unlikely that a player will meet another player no matter how many systems they explore. This is a procedurally generated simulation so vast that it is effectively infinite.

Virtual Reality is about to go mainstream. A headset equipped with a screen for each eye creates true 3D vision and earphones for stereo hearing take care of two of our senses. How long before the rest can be simulated too? How long before the screens are done away with and we just have the feeds hard wired into our brains? For future generations put out of work by increasingly autonomous manufacturing techniques, what better way to escape the dour landscape of an overcrowded world than to enter VR and take on the role of a human in the time before we stripped the planet bare?riftshipping2

There is another possibility that should be examined and the best way to approach it is to come at it arse end first. Fast forward in time, not that far, to a place where computational power is capable of creating, running and maintaining complex artificial intelligences in a virtual environment. These people – they are intelligent, living beings – interact with their environment as if it were real. They can see, hear, touch, smell, taste the same as we can. They don’t know that their environment is simulated. There is no way for them to test anything beyond what their senses tell them. They live and die in virtual ignorance. Whole worlds are simulated at a time. Simulation upon simulation, billions of worlds in billions of galaxies, countless trillions of people going about their daily routines. Can we accept that someday this would be possible? That each individual of the species could have at their fingertips the power to create these virtual worlds and virtual humans, billions of people for every ‘real’ person. We can? Good. Once you’ve accepted that, then you have accepted that the odds are billions to one that you are one of the virtual people living in a virtual world constructed from someone else’s parameters.

Does that make you any the less real? I don’t think so, you are conscious and (largely) autonomous even if you are living in a simulation, and even if you suspect, as in this case, that you are living in a simulation, there is no way for you to prove that and there’s nothing to be gained from that knowledge anyway.

I mentioned No Man’s Sky earlier on, and I did so because it is a prime example of just this sort of world creation, awaiting only the true AI for the inhabitants that it procedurally and uniquely generates on each planet it creates in an infinite universe. We’re almost there. We can almost make this real, now, in 2016, only 40 years after the first mainstream video game, pong. Think what we will be able to do in another 40.

So now we come to the funky bit. Just for the sake of argument, consider that someone, somewhere created a simulation of a world, a universe even. They will have done so by setting variables, the strength of gravity, the speed of light, the density of mass in the galaxies, the distance of the planet from its sun, its dimensions, axial tilt, spin rate, its age, its history (and prehistory) could all be generated from simple data entered into a template on a very complex program. It could be done in minutes, hours or if real detail was rHand-of-Godequired, days. Perhaps six of them. Maybe He rested on the seventh.

Would that make Him a real god, omnipotent and omnipresent? As far as the inhabitants in our first scenario, people using VR to while away their boredom, occasionally surfacing for sustenance, no. The creator would be able to control every aspect of their VR environment on a whim but would have no control over their ‘base reality’, the everyday comings and goings outside of VR.

But in the case of generated AIs populating a generated planet, in a generated universe, unaware that they are in a simulated environment, the answer is a resounding, yes. For all intents and purposes, the Creator would be omnipotent and capable of observing and interacting with anything, anywhere at any time. For them, a very real God would exist. From the comfort of his armchair in his base reality, he could see what was going down in the simulation and, if he was interested enough, he could manipulate events, unseen, from there or he could create a human avatar (or a burning bush for dramatic effect) and interact within the simulation as if he were one of them.

How tempting would it be to interfere at the beginning of the experiment? “No, no, no, that’s not how I want you to do it. Do it like this! Look, I’ll leave some instructions for you to be getting along with…”

Taken a step further, with enough raw computational power, the simulation could be run at any speed relative to the time frame of the creator. Thousands, millions of years could pass in simulated reality in mere minutes of the creator’s base reality. He could set event traps and otherwise fast-forward to the interesting bits.

 

I have two questions:

How would you get the creator’s attention?

Would you want to?

Author: John King

I've led a fairly diverse life, I've been a programmer, motorcycle courier, bouncer, logger, IT trainer and Server Systems Manger for a large multinational. I've been riding motorcycles since I was 15. I am a father of two and have been married to the same lass for over 20 years. I started reading voraciously when I was less than a decade old. I have never stopped. I've been writing for around 15 years off and on and enjoy it more and more each day. I have been known to swear. A lot.

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