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Comment by skulk | Hacker News Reader

Why stop at a computer, why not extend the argument to a full simulation of a human brain? What if I sat in my room for 3 million years simulating 3 seconds of a human body including the brain? Assuming that my simulation is faithful, who's to say that my simulation doesn't have some form of consciousness or subjective experience?

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You can go even deeper: given that your simulation follows a set of known rules from an initial state, what does actually performing those steps even matter?

Is the consciousness given existence because you perform calculations on paper, or does it exist already within the fabric of reality and you're merely exposing it?

I think a common mistake is to conflate “consciousness” with “intelligence” or at least “thought”.

Just because we don’t tend to recognize one without the other doesn’t mean they necessarily have a causative relationship.

I'm not sure what you mean. Just listing the steps of an algorithm is quite different than executing the steps of an algorithm. As an obvious example, with an algorithm for summing two numbers together, the difference between listing the steps and executing them is that when you execute them you are provided with the sum.

I don't see any sense in which these aren't different, unless perhaps you're introducing some separate cosmological "Boltzmann brain"-style argument that all possible finite results of all halting algorithms will arise or have arisen due to random fluctuations. But in that case you've got a whole new set of assumptions to address.

The idea of a fundamental difference between the result of "performed" and "un-performed" computation always leads me to imagining the null universe, where nothing gets computed ever but all math "exists" as we'd expect. It begs the question, why is the universe non-null? Allowing the mere existence of the possibility of computation to answer that question is very comforting. But yes, it requires approximately as much faith as any monotheistic religion.

Does it really? When one considers that we take seriously the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and nigh-uncountable Calabi-Yau manifold topologies of superstring theory? There is some suggestion that our experiential reality is but one infinitesimal slice of existence even among the empirically minded.

I don't think we have any real observations that rule out the Matrix theory (e.g. existence of a "creator"), so I think it does. I'm not sure how parsimony plays into this; I do think MUH[0] is the most parsimonious TOE.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...

This is why I find it so strange that philosophers seem to by in large accept "Cogito Ergo Sum" or "I think therefor I am" as a valid proof of ontology. What if the appearance of thought is not actually thought?

Did philosophers not watch Blade runner? Sure Descartes didn't - but contemporaries sure as shit do!

But how do you even distinguish appearance of thought from actual thought, objectively? Of course you can always argue that actual thought is something that is subjectively experienced, but that leads to solipsism, doesn't it?

Solipsism is what you get from accepting the Cogito "I know I exist for sure, and only my own existence can be verified by the cogito"

To answer your question, I claim that you can't. Radical skepticism ("we live in the universe of the evil demon"), which is what I advocate for, means that you can't even claim that you exist. See the works of Max Stirner for further elaboration of the implications of this for Philosophy.

This is essentially the philosophical zombie thought experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

Not to downplay Descartes (his philosophy, specifically the process he undertakes, is worth a study), but something that the pop summaries of his writing really gloss over is that his entire premise hinges on something he takes as assumed true that need not be, and if it isn't, the rest goes straight off the rails.

Paraphrasing from memory: he pins "cogito ergo sum" on the assumption that objective knowledge is possible. That assumption is built atop imagining an alternative: an evil demon has full control over his senses and feeds him whatever it wants to (essentially, the 'Matrix hypothesis'). His solution to this concern? "A loving God wouldn't create a universe that banal and meaningless."

It's only a proof if you accept the postulate that objective reality is correlated with experience.

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