Universe as simulation and how to simulate qualia
When talking about the possibility that we are living in some kind of simulated universe, it is never questioned how could you possibly simulate qualia in it.
Matrix type simulation is one thing, there are actual humans outside the simulator. But that the whole universe is being simulated in which we only exist virtually, is being accepted too easy considering that we know of no way how could possibly something mechanical like computation ever produce something conceptual like imagination, intuition, feelings, and the rest of the mental content. Or do we?
Matrix type simulation is one thing, there are actual humans outside the simulator. But that the whole universe is being simulated in which we only exist virtually, is being accepted too easy considering that we know of no way how could possibly something mechanical like computation ever produce something conceptual like imagination, intuition, feelings, and the rest of the mental content. Or do we?
Comments (53)
* The video game argument. In the 70's we had Pong and now we have realtime networked shoot 'em ups; so in the future "a simulation will be indistinguishable from reality." But this assumes there is a mind doing the distinguishing. If you put a super duper VR headset on me and wire it up to a supercomputer, you could simulate a very convincing reality for me. But it would still be my mind doing the experiencing. We'd be back to Descartes' evil daemon. Even if you are fooling me, my mind exists.
So this idea doesn't explain the mind or even attempt to.
* The idea that the mind itself is a simulation. That a computer program could implement a mind. Now we're back to Searle's Chinese room. We have no evidence that a computer could implement a mind; only simulate an environment.
A lot of the AI hype that I read does not distinguish these two cases.
Any computers you could find in the universe would be part of the simulation.
That doesn't require any computers.
Exactly, so I'm looking if there are any arguments claiming the opposite.
Sure, everyone who disagrees with Searle about the Chinese room argument. Just Google Chinese room and half the links will be on one side and half on the other.
Chinese room is restricted by its setting, replies to it are lame. Many people believe consciousness can be simulated, so I am hoping to find something less senseless than “room is conscious”. It was also disappointing to hear Giulio Tononi (Integrated information theory), when asked about qualia, to say “that’s just how integrated information feels”.
I'm not an expert in these matters. Perhaps someone else can jump in.
Yes, once you conclude no kind of mechanics could even begin to explain subjective experience, then panpsychism comes on top as the remaining alternative.
But then, if you look at all the processing for visual perception, for example, it not only reminds of algorithmic modularity, but is apparently necessary, for some reason.
So at the end panpsychism doesn’t explain anything, and the old questions kind of remain because it still needs to explain all the computing, not how to produce sentience per se, but how it all comes together, plus what brain processing has anything to do with it and why.
On the other hand, I see a way to argue for virtual, simulated mind and consciousness, but whether it will be deemed plausible depends more on the definition of the word “experience” than on the argument itself. In other words, if only we could define it, then we would be able to simulate it. Unless, of course, panpsychism or ghosts are real, in which case we might be able to emulate it.
Pretty much everyone seems to agree that the mechanics is necessary, and the question at hand is whether it is sufficient: is there something else besides mechanical behavior needed to account for experience? The eliminativist says "no", the behavior just is the experience; you seem to disagree with that, as do I. Many say "yes", it needs some special thing besides the mechanical stuff. The panpsychist like me says "yes", but it's nothing special or a different kind of stuff: it comes for free with the same stuff that does the behavior, but it is not identical to the behavior, but rather the flip side of the same thing the behavior is one side of: function.
In relation to this, I have often wondered whether it really does make any difference whether the 'states of energy / fields' that are making up the most elementary particles of the universe are in the end part of 'nature' or are part of a big 'machine'. Like the 0s and 1s are the fundamental states of our own primitive computers, so could the spins of quarks be fundamental states of a machine which is simulating the universe.
In other words, would you feel more at ease if consciousness arose not out of a simulation on a machine from another dimension, but out of 'natural' states of energy fluctuation, which via matter eventually created consciousness?
Experience is an event that leaves some kind of impression on the subject. If panpsychist wants to claim stones are sentient they should point out what particular kind of change in a stone could reflect impression of some event.
If they do, then they would end up describing some mechanics, leaving it unclear whether the dynamics of it by itself is sufficient. Panpsychists have a problem to justify their hypothesis is even necessary.
If they don’t, then the change caused by an event impression must be going on in some unknown substance or dimension, and if that is the belief it makes panpsychism equal with theological dualism.
The eliminativist says "no", nothing has first-person experience.
The dualist says yes only if there is some immaterial mind connected to the material thing (substance dualism), or if some immaterial mental properties are attached to the same thing as the material properties are attached to (property dualism).
The emergentist says yes if the matter is arranged just right, it starts having first-person experience, in a way that mean something more than that it starts exhibiting the behavior you seem to be talking about, which to me looks tantamount to some kind of dualism: some new, metaphysically weird thing starts happening to physical things that behave certain ways.
The panpsychist says yes, anything exhibiting that kind of mechanical behavior has the same kind of first-person experience as a human brain that exhibits that behavior does, because everything has some kind of first-person experience and that's completely trivial, what matters is the kind of experience, which varies right alongside the mechanical behavior.
The panpsychist, emergentist, and eliminativist all agree with each other, and disagree with the usual kinds of dualist, that anything that exhibits that mechanical behavior has the same kind of first-person experience.
The panpsychist and eliminativist agree with each other and disagree with the emergentist in that they say there is nothing metaphysically different between a human brain and a rock, all that's different is the physical stuff going on there.
The panpsychist and the eliminativist disagree about whether there is any first-person experience ever being had by anything ever: the eliminativist says no, and the panpsychist says yes.
So to disagree with the panpsychist, you have to either deny that you and I have any first-person experience, or else postulate that something metaphysically strange happens somewhere in the evolutionary chain from rocks to people. Panpsychism is just what you get when you say that nothing metaphysically weird is happening, the only difference between me and a rock is the stuff my brain does that rocks don't do, but yeah, I do actually have a first-person experience, I'm not a P-zombie (and therefore rocks must also have some kind of first-person experience, which differs from mine in the same way and for the same reason as my brain's behavior differs from the rock's behavior).
Experience is an event that leaves some kind of impression on the subject. That is just English, very general metaphysical logic, does not imply mechanics nor physicalism, it only implies change. It should not be controversial, simply means if x remains identical after some event then x has not perceived that event. So, if we agree now, then my point still stands.
That is just about the only positive claim from panpsychism. It is generally not controversial, does not explain anything, does not make it testable, and it poses its own additional questions, so it has no value and there is no point in accepting it as such simple assertion.
The only pragmatic thing we can take from panpsychism is to be cautious about yet undiscovered or undiscoverable properties, substances, or dimensions, which brings me to my second point that panpsychism is no different than dualism, and this becomes clear as soon as you start unpacking what the proposal actually entails.
Something metaphysically strange did happen somewhere in the evolutionary chain from rocks to people, and that is self-replicating molecules, i.e. life. You can not really get the definition of “self” before that, naturally at least, so it is only logical to conclude sentience goes along, or is produced by, something at minimum living, that is animated, plastic and dynamic thing.
These same properties are also what enables the possibility of experience, and then such “self” having impression of an experience within itself is really a claim about 1st person subjective experience, so this actually answers the mystery, semantically at least, but that should perhaps be enough, or maybe the most we can expect.
That is not metaphysically strange. That is a notable development in the physical behavior of stuff, sure, but there's nothing philosophically, ontologically, metaphysically weird about it: it's just molecules doing a neat new thing, but that thing is just a combination of things molecules were always perfectly capable of.
Likewise for "an event [to] leave[] some kind of impression on the subject". There's nothing metaphysically weird required for that. All kinds of ordinary physical processes record impressions of events in the objects that are subjected to them. Fossilized dinosaur footprints in mud are not metaphysically weird, but they're a literal impression of an event on the mud.
If all you're talking about when you talk about "experience" is something the brain does, then you're just talking about uncontroversial physical behavior. A dualist, eliminativist, emergentist, and panpsychist will all agree that yep, brains behave in that way. Where they disagree is on:
- whether anything that behaves that way has the same first-person experience (dualist says no, others say yes)
- whether anything can have any first-person experience at all (eliminativist says no, others say yes)
- whether having this metaphysical property(?) of a first-person experience in the first place depends upon behaving that way (emergentist says yes, others say no)
So panpsychism is the only position that says yes, anything that exhibits that same physical behavior has the same first-person experience; and yes, at least some things do have a first-person experience; and no, nothing is metaphysically special about things with that physical behavior in that regard.
Quoting Wikipedia on qualia
No, I don't think qualia can be supported, since we can't simulate the stuff even without doing qualia.
So, no, flag the feature request as either WONTFIX or more elusively as NEXTVERSION.
(There will be no next version! Just like Windows 10 this version will be the "last version"! haha ah ;-)!)
How do I know what I mean if I don’t see what I said, seems to me you might be wondering if I ever ask myself about what other people ought to do more often. I have to check now to see if we are speaking the same language...
1. subjective experience consists of "self" and "experience"
-- No? Then, what concepts do you think it consists of?
2. experience is a change some event impresses upon "self"
-- No? Then, what is your definition of “experience”?
3. self is autonomous entity capable of having own impressions
-- No? Then, what is your definition of “self”?
Right now I’m not talking about simulation, but panpsychism. I’m trying to put forward the most general, metaphysical definition that everyone can agree on regardless of philosophical stance. It is not intended to describe function, but the bare concept. I’m simply asking what do you mean by the word “subjective” and “experience” when you say “subjective experience”.
The notion that the universe is a simulation seems silly to me, but your fundamental issue seems to be with the nature of consciousness, and whether a human-like consciousness could possibly be constructed. I don't think sensory-input qualia are necessarily a problem: e.g. knowing redness entails experiencing redness in the way our sensory apparatus presents it. The REALLY hard problem is feelings (e.g. pain, desire). It's hard, and we aren't close to figuring it out, but that hardly seems like a good reason to jump to conclusions like panpsychism.
What do you mean?
I don’t see much difference between external sensations and internal emotions, both feel like feelings. Cognition seems different, but on some basic level cognition too feels like a feeling. In other words, I think they are all hiding behind the same mystery.
What if I told you that feelings are a special kind of information or signal that carries its meaning within? Like a magical language no one has to learn, but is innately and universally “understood” by all the living. And so when you feel pain you know it means “bad” the moment you are 1st time aware of it, and when you perceive yellow or feel desire you know it’s “yellow” or “desire” even if no one knows what they mean or how to actually describe them.
Just jumping in to the thread, curious about this. Why the living? If consciousness (feelings, qualia, etc.) are information, then we already know that the substrate doesn't matter. There's a Youtube video of a logic gate made from dominos. That's in fact the argument of those who say we could "upload" our minds to computers, or that we ourselves are computers.
But you're saying that only the living get the privilege of experiencing experience. If I take the same program and put it in a computer, it executes but doesn't feel anything. But if I run it on a living thing with a sufficiently complex nervous system, then consciousness happens.
Is that a fair summary of your point of view? Do people think life is necessary for consciousness, or not? Must robots be condemned to be philosophical zombies? Or might my Roomba be ruminating?
Not “just information”, I said “special kind of information that carries meaning within”. Words are information, for example, but they do not contain meaning, so to understand them you need to learn them first.
It is not claim that consciousness is how computation feels like, nor that the substrate doesn't matter. I’m simply saying own sensations and emotions are information we understand without need to interpret or learn first in order to understand what they mean, and yet, interestingly, it is impossible to describe them in terms of how they actually feel.
Because of how I defined “experience” and “self” earlier, and because we do not know what that “special kind of information that carries meaning within” actually is, what it entails, or how it works.
Again, I am not promoting any philosophical view, just trying to make very general but meaningful statements that I think everyone can agree on, so we can talk about the same thing rather than talking past each other.
Well I can't agree till I understand what you're saying. Why can't a computer, or an "information processing system," be conscious? We're information processing systems and we're conscious.
Feelings aren't just information, they drive behavior. Information doesn't directly drive behavior; it only indirectly does so through the feeling-associations.
Quoting Zelebg
We have the capacity to distinguish color, so each color is basically just information. Bits of information in our brains (including perceived colors) have associations to other information and to feelings (e.g. blueness might invoke a pleasureable feeling associated with experiencing a clear, blue sky).
Without feelings, there's just information storage. Feelings drive intentional behavior.
Quoting Zelebg
When a nonhuman animal feels pain, it reacts behaviorally - just as we do. We humans also associate various words with that feeling ("bad", "hurts"), and are thusly able to communicate and reason about it- which can lead to more effective actions, but the feeling which drives us to do something is the same.
What is "meaning"? If we just consider information, then meaning just entails a dictionary - a word means its definition. Only when you add in the associated feelings do you get to the essence of meaning.
That statement was not about simulation. I do not wish to argue that computers can not, instead I want to hear the best arguments how computers actually can simulate consciousness, and only if there is none on offer, then I might argue that point myself - that computers can simulate it.
Computers can simulate physical systems. Human brains are physical systems. Human brains are conscious. So a simulation of a human brain will be conscious, unless you think there’s some spooky metaphysical thing going on in real human brains that isn’t going on in simulated ones.
But it sounds to me like you don’t actually care about that metaphysical stuff, what you really want to know is what is the thing that human brains do that gives them the kind of conscious experience that they have. That’s a good question, but a different question than the metaphysical question, a better question than the metaphysical question, but an empirical question that needs to be answered by neuroscientists and software engineers, not one that we can speculatively answer on a philosophy forum.
So called “symbol grounding problem”. Meaning is what information represents in a given context. Meaning can be a physical object, abstract concept, property, action, relation, and whatnot.
I might think that if I ever decide what to think, but right now that is what you think… aren't you the panpsychist here?
It’s the dualist and emergentist who say that human brains have some metaphysical difference from other things, though the emergentist at least says that that metaphysical difference “emerges” somehow from the functional difference.
The eliminativist, like the panpsychist, says that nothing besides functionality differs between rocks and brains, but rather than saying that whatever it is besides function that makes brains capable of phenomenal, subjective, first-person experience also exists in everything else, the elimanitivist says that there is no such thing as phenomenal, subjective, first-person experience at all, even in human brains.
No, panpsychism claims everything is conscious because it is a fundamental physical property, additional to electromagnetism and gravity,
Panpsychist can not claim consciousness can be simulated, it’s absurd. What do you need simulation for if a computer is already conscious by itself, even when broken or turned off?
And what exactly is supposed to be conscious in such a setting: program or computer, or both, or every atom individually, or electric components make up one consciousness while all the plastic parts another?
Your belief is called functionalism, not panpsychism. Try to define your terms, write down what is “self” and what is “experience”, then it should become easier to understand what is it you actually believe and how much it doesn’t make any sense.
I am both a functionalist and a panpsychist, and have been pretty explicit about that this whole time. There are two “problems of” or types of consciousness: the easy problem of access consciousness, and the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness. I am a functionalist about the first and a panpsychist about the second.
You seem to be conflating the two together and asking what function constitutes phenomenal consciousness, which is not a coherent question because phenomenal consciousness is definitionally about whatever is involved in consciousness besides function or behavior.
I don’t say that everything is access consciousness, which I think is the important kind of consciousness, precisely because it is what is different and special about humans compared to other things. I do say that everything is phenomenally conscious, because phenomenal consciousness is such a trivial thing that even rocks have it and that doesn’t mean anything important.
That sounds like emergentism. In any case you can not claim to be panpsychist without postulating there is sentience present within universe existing as additional fundamental physical property such as electromagnetism or gravity...
...which means you can not believe it can be simulated just like magnetic fields can not be simulated to produce magnetic attraction and repulsion, but only to produce abstract representation of spatial movement and geometrical arrangement resulting.
Neither functionalist nor panpsychist seem to have a definition of "self", so it is dubious what they mean when they say "subjective experience".
Tell that to Galen Strawson.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen_Strawson
Strawson has argued that what he calls "realistic physicalism" entails panpsychism. He writes that "as a real physicalist, then, I hold that the mental/experiential is physical.
It confirms what I said - you can not claim to be panpsychist without postulating there is sentience present within universe existing as additional fundamental physical property such as electromagnetism or gravity.
Yes, physical, it means it can not be simulated, just like you can not produce magnetic attraction by simulating bar magnet, just like you can not produce moisture or wind by simulating hurricane. Do you understand now?
Cortical Homunculus
The image above is called the cortical homonculus and shows how the sensori-motor system of our body maps onto the brain. The image clearly shows that our head and hands take up a major portion of cerebral real estate.
Video games are at the forefront of simulated realities and notice they, for all purposes, engage the head and the hand. There's a display & sound to experience the simulation and a hand-held controller to navigate the environment.
All in all, if the cortical homunculus is an accurate representation of our bodies AND with video games built as they are, simulated realities are already being experienced by our brains. All we need to do now, to complete the process, is to work our way through the rest of the brain's sensori-motor cortex.
Why can't I post images?
In any case that’s besides the point of panpsychism. The panpsychist (at least the contemporary kind, a pan-proto-experientialist) would say that the computer running the simulation already had the kind of trivial fundamental phenomenal experience that all things have, and when part of it was programmed to function like a human brain, that part of it would begin to have a phenomenal experience like a human has.
It had SOME experience before already, it was just a tremendously simple and boring kind, just like its behavior was tremendously simple and boring compared to that of a human brain. But when you make something that DOES more interesting complicated stuff, built up out of the boring simple stuff its parts could already do, it also begins to EXPERIENCE more interesting complicated things, built up out of the boring simple things its parts could already experience.
The contemporary panpsychist like me or Galen Strawson is just saying that complicated interesting experiences like humans are capable of are built up out of boring simple experiences that the stuff we’re made of is capable of, in exactly the same way that the complicated interesting behaviors we exhibit are built up out of boring simple behaviors the stuff we’re made of exhibits.
The dualist, in contrast, thinks there’s some other kind of stuff that does interesting complicated experiencing to being with and physical stuff gets its apparent experience from that.
The emergentist similarly says that sufficiently interesting complicated stuff just suddenly starts having complicated interesting experiences out of nowhere at some point, not built up out of simpler more boring stuff, just appearing by magic.
The eliminativist says that nothing has any kind of experience, simple or complicated, interesting or boring; behavior is all there is to account for.
All of those sound far more absurd than “the complex and interesting experiences we have are just built out of the boring simple experiences everything already has”.
:up: :ok:
There is no but, simulation can not produce actual physical phenomena, i.e. you were wrong as I already explained. That's all.
No one seems too worried about this bit. But I have NEVER (before) heard of a simulated universe that is the whole the universe. That doesn't even make sense as it would not be a simulation of anything.
By definition a simulation is an "imitation"...so a simulated universe must exist within some universe (or somehow 'outside' all universes yet aware of their properties...if that is even a reasonable thought) or it is not a simulation.
For me the only worthwhile argument for a simulated universe is the idea that it could be possible to create such a thing. If the simulation will EVER be possible, then what are the odds that we live in the original universe vs one of the infinite simulations that would emerge. However, this same logic can be applied to time travel so I think you are justified in questioning whether it ever will be possible.
A simulation of gravity doesn't attract nearby bowling balls. A simulation of the brain would perfectly simulate the behavior of a brain but would not necessarily implement consciousness.
Is there something spooky about wetware? We don't know. That's Searle's argument I believe. Something special about the wetware.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Exactly right. If the world is a simulation, what's it a simulation of??
Yes, but only in the case qualia is indeed physical phenomena. Alternative being virtual phenomena.