Can I copy my consciousness into another machine, DNA based or silicon, someday? Not just the information stored within my brain, but the experience of “being here”.
“If, by your experiments, I am destroyed, something unique – something wonderful – will be lost.” – Data, TNG “Measure of a Man”
Sure someday, why not.
I remember reading the same kind of confidence about real AI and fusion (were 20 years away…). I suspect that there are potential insurmountable issues.
Can I copy my consciousness into another machine, DNA based or silicon, someday? Not just the information stored within my brain, but the experience of “being here”.
Maybe if you were awake, and we copy very, very slowly, and destroy the parts of your host’s brain as we copy it to the new host, you won’t notice enough to complain about “not being here”.
Cartesian Doubt is one of my favorite philosophical methods!
Since we cannot be sure that the information our brain processes is accurate, and we must assume it is, there is a possibility we all live in The Sims.
I think application of Occam’s Laser is needed.
We aren’t in a very convincing simulation. Everything tastes like chicken.
Absolute proof that we aren’t in a simulation… Chocolate
This substance serves no purpose beyond being an enjoyable item, yet the multiple discoveries that were nescessary to produce it illustrate how simple reasoning capability can produce unexpected outcomes.
The raw cocoa nuts are possitively vile. Yet if roasted, then ground they produce an amazing substance.
All of the wonders produced by us can be explained by the capabilities of the human mind. At least the minds of makers.
All of the wonders of the universe can be explained by mechanical processes, random chance, and time.
Ah, but what if chocolate, random chance, and all that is explainable is part of an elaborate series of bug fixes, designed to make the simulation just that much more convincing? After all, we are only recently discovering such things, and most modern knowledge is derived from Wikipedia anyway!
Since such suppositions are inherrently as unknowable (proveable) as the existence of god they are nothing more then intellectual mast#=$.
Since everything can be explained by mechanical processes, random chance and time, what more explaination is needed?
I think Musk sums up his belief in the same way many of us believe in aliens. There’s billions and billions of worlds out there with a chance for alien life. And now, Musk implies that we may be sharing a simulated reality with all of them.
If we are in a simulated reality and simply artificial intelligences we should be able to reprogram the parameters of the simulation–in short alter our natural laws. Lets start with a simple parameter, make chocolate inedible… 
Reverse engineering our natural laws might be possible, but I doubt we’ll get the source code. Even then, I think hacking from inside the simulation might be tough, and would be patched eventually.
Actually raw cacao has a lot of nutritional value, and apparently you can get a sort of high off of it…
And that would provide actual evidence we are in a simulation. So would any change in a natural law (say gravity).
Still tastes like sh$@
Though I am never surprised by how much ingenuity goes into find a way to get high.
After all who decided to try out the first mushroom growing on a cow turd…
You assume the change would be made on the fly, and only to that individual natural law. If the change were made not just to the law, but all storage related to the law (ie, I don’t just change the id of one element, I have to also update that id anywhere it is stored or I break something), then we wouldn’t know it had ever been different, except by possibly noticing that an object is now in a different position than we think it should be. And even that would depend on how much data update a patch had caused. Perhaps the update goes all the way down to update the stored paramaters of how fast the ball was thrown, not just the force pulling it down. And in a simulation, our own memories are just storage locations. If the gravitational constant is altered, all locations in our “brains” storing the gravitational constant would also be altered.
But even easier, when I make a fundamental change like that in one of my simulations, I normally restart the simulation. Can you tell which iteration you are on? Sure, it’s possible that a change to the constant prevents you from being born. Maybe that’s what happened back in version 6.4. Now that we’re running in version 8.3, you were born. If “they” change something else, we won’t have any knowledge that we ceased to exist.
And that all makes assumptions on how the simulation is running. Elon’s statement about “indistinguishable from reality” is about us creating something that is indistinguishable to us from reality. But perhaps reality for the creators is 6th dimensional, and they haven’t even gotten to that point. We would be unable to distinguish our reality from a simulation anyway.
Then take into account the random procedural games. Perhaps the patch for chocolate was added as an end product to motivate some actor or class of actors within the simulation, or just to provide another economic factor. The random procedural nature of the simulation could have chosen the creation path on it’s own, and back filled all of history for it. Perhaps the simulation hasn’t been running long enough to have covered history far enough back to get to the invention of chocolate. But the simulation engine knows where it can insert the bits of history necessary to show the evolutionary path of chocolate. Any actor inside the simulation that searches for that history in any form finds that computer generate history. If it is even possible for the actor within the simulation to become frustrated at the lack of detail within the simulation, a dev can instruct the generator do generate another couple of pieces to the puzzle.
Once you start down this path, there isn’t really ANYTHING that you can say that would prove we are in a simulation. If we ever find such proof, it’s because a dev either left it there for us to find to watch our reactions, or left it by accident. And if by accident, it may have already happened hundreds of times and has been patched out. A good example is the simulated town in the holodeck in star trek voyager (I don’t remember the episode or town name). The citizens started noticing things they shouldn’t have. Their conclusions were all based on their point of view, and never came close to “we are in a simulation”. And at any point, the crew could have restarted the simulation, but chose not to.
None of your simulations have autonomous artificial intelligences in them. You are right, I did make an assumption, which is that the entity creating the simulation either can not or will not alter the internal software of an AI, assuming the study of the AI is the purpose of the simulation.
You are correct, that if one assumes the creator of the simulation has no limit on what they can modify in the simulation, then there is no way to test if your in a simulation. In my opinion that is why the question has zero value. Indeed it has even less value then an equally unanswerable question, which is ‘does god exist’. The reason it has less value is the contemplation of the question will not produce the socially useful moral and ethical values that can help govern and regulate a civilization.
Indeed it has even less value then an equally unanswerable question, which is ‘does god exist’. The reason it has less value is the contemplation of the question will not produce the socially useful moral and ethical values that can help govern and regulate a civilization.
If one were so inclined to design a religion that would produce socially useful, moral, and ethical values that can help govern and regulate a civilization, then these “simulation” notions might be of value to anyone that may reject more traditional spiritual ideals, especially in future generations.
I wasn’t referring to spiritual values, but practical ones. Things like don’t steal, don’t murder, etc… Such values were historically derived from religious institutions. It is certainly possible to derive the same basic moral principals without contemplating the existence of god and his punishment, and there are ample philosophical texts that do so; however, we have evidence that such contemplation (god(s)) spurred our discovery/invention of such moral principals.
I do not see how the mental mastur%^& about this all being a computer simulation could provide any practical benefit to society much less one of such profound importance. Sorry, I am old and such things don’t interest me anymore. Now, in college and with suitable chemical assistance it was a different story.