"Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch"

[kstar]

I have brought this up a couple of times in the "God" thread and just saw this article in the NYT regarding the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation. As radical as it sounds, there's a fair chance it may be true, IMHO.

The original hypothesis I saw was here:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Below is the full text from the NYT:

August 14, 2007
FINDINGS
Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

By JOHN TIERNEY
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.

“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.

David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation. (For more on survival strategies in a computer simulation, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).

Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer?

If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.

It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.

If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.

It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.”

source (requires registration): http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

[dhoward]

I hope I don't bluescreen today...

[onewhippedpuppy]

Coming soon, to Sci-Fi!

[Joeaksa]

So who is really John Galt?

[RoninLB]

the NY Times took off on a Aug 20 & 27, 2007 Businessweek article




Boosting Our Gray Matter

Bright idea or not, brain enhancements may become as available—and compulsory—as software updates

There's a famous scene in the sci-fi film The Matrix where the heroine, Trinity, learns to fly a helicopter by uploading instructions straight to her brain. Neuroscientists would love to master that trick so they could help patients suffering from brain injuries and diseases.

In fact, in animal experiments, scientists are already tackling all aspects of brain repair and enhancement, using electronic implants and biological techniques to boost memory and other functions. A few labs have even given human test subjects the ability to control a computer cursor with their thoughts.

There's no telling how today's research will change the world of work in 10 or 20years' time. But once the tools and techniques are perfected, there's little question competitive individuals will get swept up in a race to expand their brain capacity. As that gets under way, it's destined to overturn today's paradigm of cubicled executives laboring on laptops, palm devices, and cell phones, besieged by constant software updates.

Perhaps the electronically augmented executive in 2025 will be able to absorb whole new fields of information by beaming it, Matrix-style, straight to circuits in his modified cortex. But even this scenario probably understates the workplace revolution that lies ahead. If you think Wi-Fi, BlackBerries, blogs, social networks, and Second Life are changing the way we work, wait until you see what enhanced cognitive equipment can do.

Medical scientists today spend little time dreaming about enhanced humans. They're too busy aiding the ill or injured, trying to reverse the ravages of Parkinson's disease or struggling to help patients cope with anxiety or depression. But where demand exists, supply follows. "Anything for therapeutic purposes has the potential to be used for the improvement of normal people," says Arthur L. Caplan, professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

This prospect raises some troublesome ethical issues. Many people are put off by the notion of physically bettering the brainthe root of thought, personality, individuality, and human nature itself. And some ethicists question the wisdom of handing new brain tools over to society so that privileged individuals can exploit them to get even further ahead of everyone else.

Other scientists don't see the harm. If the cost of advanced brain technologies drops quickly and the surgical risks become less dire, people may request brain chips as casually as they receive a shot of Botox. And if that enhances their performance, then customers and clients are bound to share in the benefits. "Don't we want our medical interns and pilots to have optimal brain function?" asks James J. Hughes, a professor of health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. "Wouldn't that be an obligation of the job?" It's a good question for our grandchildren to ponder, with their medically enhanced minds.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Yeah, the day that becomes commonplace is the day I move to the sticks and become a farmer. I know how often my computer software fails, the last thing I want is the same people "enhancing" my brain.

[dhoward]

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."

[Superman]

I love this kind of stuff and would like to take this theory seriously but there's a problem. Consciousness. I could easily imagine programming an entire world full of people and history and ancestors, etc. But I can't accept that the characters in the program are given consciousness. Their lives might be viewable or even experienceable, but they don't get their own consciousness.

[Aerkuld]

Originally Posted by Superman

I love this kind of stuff and would like to take this theory seriously but there's a problem. Consciousness. I could easily imagine programming an entire world full of people and history and ancestors, etc. But I can't accept that the characters in the program are given consciousness. Their lives might be viewable or even experienceable, but they don't get their own consciousness.

Doesn't this come back to "Cogito, ergo sum", or "I think, therefore I am"?

Does the argument of René Descartes work along these same lines?

[kstar]

Originally Posted by Superman

I love this kind of stuff and would like to take this theory seriously but there's a problem. Consciousness. I could easily imagine programming an entire world full of people and history and ancestors, etc. But I can't accept that the characters in the program are given consciousness. Their lives might be viewable or even experienceable, but they don't get their own consciousness.

It is argued here that "consciousness" is a function of adequate computing power:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

Excerpt 1:

Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race

Excerpt 2:

Such a mature stage of technological development will make it possible to convert planets and other astronomical resources into enormously powerful computers. It is currently hard to be confident in any upper bound on the computing power that may be available to posthuman civilizations. As we are still lacking a “theory of everything”, we cannot rule out the possibility that novel physical phenomena, not allowed for in current physical theories, may be utilized to transcend those constraints[2] that in our current understanding impose theoretical limits on the information processing attainable in a given lump of matter. We can with much greater confidence establish lower bounds on posthuman computation, by assuming only mechanisms that are already understood. For example, Eric Drexler has outlined a design for a system the size of a sugar cube (excluding cooling and power supply) that would perform 10^21 instructions per second.[3] Another author gives a rough estimate of 10^42 operations per second for a computer with a mass on order of a large planet.[4] (If we could create quantum computers, or learn to build computers out of nuclear matter or plasma, we could push closer to the theoretical limits. Seth Lloyd calculates an upper bound for a 1 kg computer of 5*10^50 logical operations per second carried out on ~10^31 bits.[5] However, it suffices for our purposes to use the more conservative estimate that presupposes only currently known design-principles.)The amount of computing power needed to emulate a human mind can likewise be roughly estimated. One estimate, based on how computationally expensive it is to replicate the functionality of a piece of nervous tissue that we have already understood and whose functionality has been replicated in silico, contrast enhancement in the retina, yields a figure of ~10^14 operations per second for the entire human brain.[6] An alternative estimate, based the number of synapses in the brain and their firing frequency, gives a figure of ~10^16-10^17 operations per second.[7] Conceivably, even more could be required if we want to simulate in detail the internal workings of synapses and dentritic trees. However, it is likely that the human central nervous system has a high degree of redundancy on the mircoscale to compensate for the unreliability and noisiness of its neuronal components. One would therefore expect a substantial efficiency gain when using more reliable and versatile non-biological processors


The FAQ is interesting as well, and touches on Descartes:

source: http://www.simulation-argument.com/faq.html

3. Is the simulation argument a variant of Descartes' daemon or the brain-in-a-vat argument?

No, the simulation argument is fundamentally different from these traditional philosophical arguments (as explained in my reply to Brian Weatherson). The purpose of the simulation argument is different: not to set up a skeptical problem as a challenge to epistemological theories and common sense, but rather to argue that we have interesting empirical reasons to believe that a certain disjunctive claim about the world is true (that is, (1)v(2)v(3)). The Simulation argument relies crucially on non-obvious empirical premises about future technological abilities. And the conclusion of the Simulation argument is not simply that we cannot be certain that we are not living in a simulation. If we knew that fSIM (the faction of all human-like beings who are simulated) was very small but non-zero, we might not be able to be completely certain that we are not in a simulation, but this would not be a very interesting contention. (If we think that somewhere in our infinite universe there are a few “envatted brains”, then maybe we shouldn’t assign a strictly zero credence to us being envatted brains either, but so long as we thought that the proportion of brains in vats to brains in crania was small enough, we would have no ground for seriously doubting that we are not brains in vats, at least if we lacked specific evidence to the contrary). The Simulation argument is also different from ordinary brain-in-a-vat arguments in that it doesn’t begin from a starting point of doubt and ask for some compelling reason for canceling that doubt. Rather, it begins from the starting point that things are the way we believe they are, and then, while granting us that we might be justified in assigning a high initial credence to these beliefs, nevertheless tries to show that we have specific empirically-grounded reasons for revising these initial beliefs in a certain way – not so as to make us generally agnostic about the existence of an external world, but to accept the disjunctive conclusion. Thus, the Simulation argument is not best thought of as a skeptical argument that would have us be more agnostic, but rather as an argument that would have us increase our credence in one particular disjunction (and decrease our credence in its negation). It aims to tell us something about the world rather than to advise us that we know less about the world than we thought we did.

-------------------

FYI.

Best,

Kurt

[livi]

Quite plausible actually. True or not, what would it matter? The life we live is the life we know - virtual or not. Of course, I would probably feel slightly more cynical about the whole circus.

[Aurel]

We are already living in a dream, a simulation, a game where we made our choices beforehand. And the guy on the couch supervising all that is what we call God. Finally, the futuristic vision of Dr. Bostrom sounds nothing else to me than some good old spirituality revisited with a touch of technology to it.

Aurel

[RoninLB]

don't jump the gun.

afai know
besides animals, cutting edge tech has been with brain damaged patients. Last time i looked 5yrs ago one team's second stage of development had a damaged guy on the east coast communicating with a guy on the west coast through computers and a screen. Those guys had their brains literally wired. The bottleneck was limited data transfer.What they are doing is switching on/off neurons and groups of neurons.

development $ is probably not an issue as a new brain damaged patient happens routinely in the US. Each patients medical bills are huge for his lifetime.

Worst case scared brain tissue does not heal. Mild brain damage can be dealt with relatively easy. Mid way damage may be functional, but not guaranteed.

once implanting chips in damaged people is common place the door is open.

[Superman]

Originally Posted by Aerkuld

Doesn't this come back to "Cogito, ergo sum", or "I think, therefore I am"?

Does the argument of René Descartes work along these same lines?

Yes.

Descartes made a very interesting observation, albeit simple. For this, he is justifiably recognized to this day. His first observation is simply that he thinks. It has nothing to do with WHAT he thinks about or whether his perceptions are reliable. He deals with that later. His first and most important observation is that he HAS perception. He HAS experience. He is more than a processor of data. Or, more accurately, he is something else besides a processor.

The argument that consciousness is a matter of computing power is thin, in my humble opinion.

[Burnin' oil]

I have a 286 processor.

[Aerkuld]

Reading one of the original papers the author has cover the possibility of conciousness in this way;

"Provided a system implements the right sort of computational structures and processes, it can be associated with conscious experiences. It is nor an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon-based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon-based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well."

Difficult to argue with that assuming that youcan come up with a computer to perform the required number of operations to simulate the human brain which is a key presumption of the paper.

[dhoward]

Ann?
Uumellmahaye?

[Aerkuld]

Thanks Dr. Hfuhruhurr

[Aerkuld]

What's to say that what you know as you is just the computer simulation of you that you(2) have created in the simulated world. That is to say, you are the guy on the couch as well as the simulated character. That would make you(2) 'God' although you wouldn't know that you(2) had full control over the rest of the simulated world. Worse still, maybe you(2) doesn't have full control anyway and you(2) just has to deal with what the computer program gives you. That would make the programmer 'God' wouldn't it? Even worse - what if Microsoft wrote the code!!
Although that may explain spontaneous combustion.

[Moneyguy1]

I am serious about the following:

For years I have had a growing feeling that my life is being managed by something other than myself. I can't put my finger on "why". but I have concluded that life is a fiction written by someone else.

At one low point in my life I had somewhat of a personal revelation and I made a poster that stayed on my wall for over a year:

"Amazing how much power others have over me and how little I have over them".