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Comment by mentos | Hacker News Reader

What is interesting is if we are the result of an unfathomable number of transistor gates, the consciousness that arises from it would never be able to understand the 'platform' (hardware) that it sits on.. would it? The idea being that you are creating a new dimension that cannot see the dimension that gave rise to it.

I feel like no matter what we are in a 'simulation' where another dimension gave rise to ours whether it was intentional or not.

What dimension is thought in?

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Nobody said the simulation is being done with transistors. Even if it was why wouldn't it be possible? I don't see any constraints. One day humans will fully understand neurons. One day we will make an AI using transistors who will be able to "understand" transistors

I meant it more in an abstract sense. They don't have to be silicon they could be enormous metal planets and moons..

Is this really true? What about a self-aware AI? I can imagine an AI that resides on a chip and developed consciousness could conceivably control a camera/robot in the real world and literally inspect and even reverse engineer or repair/improve itself or the hardware it runs on.

True, but in the end their ability to perceive will be limited by the wires to/from those cameras to their hardware, and thus it is still possible that even the external world they thing they're observing, including themselves and their place in it, is also simulated. As in, someone could plug a "fake" camera into the AI and fool it.

I agree that an AI could be tricked into believing it's environment is the real world when it's only a simulation, just as we could be AIs in a simulation. But this doesn't preclude the possibility of an AI being able to completely inspect/understand the hardware it's running on in the real world, if given the fact that it actually is running on hardware in the real world.

I don't understand - all methods of inspection exist in the same world as the hardware and thus can be spoofed.

The thing is, what if the universe our simulation exists in has completely different laws of physics? It's almost impossible to speculate on I think.

Indeed, just like how a computer program will never detect the exact positions of all the electrons in the computer it's running on.

Not even if it tried to get that information from an external observer.

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