https://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/10/today-a-young-man-on-acid-realized-that-all-matter-is-merely-energy-condensed-to-a Safeguarding Humanity Sat, 29 Apr 2017 22:49:48 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/10/today-a-young-man-on-acid-realized-that-all-matter-is-merely-energy-condensed-to-a#comment-157161 Thu, 22 Nov 2012 17:02:07 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=5986#comment-157161 Robin, have you worked with snitlauioms? My own experience with them suggests it is much more of an open question whether the being simulated will ever have consciousness. ESPECIALLY since we are essentially clueless about where our own consciousness comes from. In a sim, you tend to build in an 1) approximation of the rules that 2) you know about. Consider the lowly neuron, we know it fires in a randomish way with increasing rate under some circumstance, with decreasing rate under other circumstances. In the sim, do we just put in the fixed rates? Do we use a random number generator to populate a randomish variation which we think has some of the same statistics as the real neurons? The problem is that what seems randomish may, and often does, reflect some more underlying rules. What if that randomish variation is not random at all, or not completely random, but rather is part of some mechanism associated with consciousness? We believe consciousness is weakly connected to the brain. We know we can focus our consciousness on some things the brain is dealing with, the text box on the screen in front of me, the part of my brain holding these ideas and transforming them to language. What if that wandering weak focus is mediated through some mechanism that shows up, in our state of ignorance, as randomish variations in neuronal firing rates? Then our sim would MISS this entirely. As with any complex functioning system, it is much easier to build something that doesn’t work than something that does. The naive engine builder puts all the pieces together and goes to fire up the engine, and it won’t even rotate forget-about firing up. The programmer is constantly building something that doesn’t work and then working hard to figure out why it doesn’t work. I realize I am sounding just pessimistic. Of course work should go forward on this, and will anyway as coding increasingly complex processors is one of the best ways to create valuable capital these days (in addition to being unbelievably fun). But I would expect brain sims to go wrong in a lot of ways for a long time. And that consciousness with shifting focus and motivation and humor and insignt and the ability to invent and triage inventions I wouldn’t expect that to show up in the sims until somewhere between pretty late in the game and never. When I first started forming my thoughts about sims, I recognized two things. 1) in a simulation of a nuclear explosion, nothing is destroyed, no energy is released. It is gigantically different from an actual nuclear explosion. 2) We already simulate people. In Vice City, I shoot cops and passing civilians all the time. The sims of people are way simpler that real people and I think beyond reasonable doubt they have no more consciousness than do the cars or the buildings in Vice City. Does consciousness just pop in by magic at some point as we make the sim more complex? Or do we actually have to understand how consiousness works, and put the necessary physics to support it into our sim, whereas we would currently just use random number generators which reflect not the physics, but our ignorance of the physics? Having worked hard to get things to work, I am pretty sure it is the latter. We will not have conscious sims until we have some idea how consciousness works, and is connected wtih brains and neurons.

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