Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think it has nothing to do with "specialness" but with proof. I can prove I am conscious, yet only to myself. I cannot prove I am conscious to you, and nothing you could do could prove you are conscious to me. In fact, it's entirely possible that our entire reality is little more than a simulation - and other entities may not even really exist, let alone be conscious.

The entities one encounters in a dream each night certainly seem real at the time, yet that illusion is shattered each morning. All the "real" reality holds to it, is that it's a timeframe that I perceive to be much longer. Why am to I believe that after my ~80 years expire I won't simply awake yet again from a sleep I did not know I was in?

This is where the oft misinterpreted quote of cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, comes from. He was not arguing that if something is thinking, then it is conscious, but rather that the only thing one can be sure of is of their own thoughts and thus their own existence.

This is what I find confusing; people are more willing these days to accept the possibility that we may be in a simulation.

Such a simulation is presumably large in scale (this assumes the "rest of the universe" as we perceive it is the way we perceive it and not just some artificial fish tank background in a part of the fish tank the fish will never have access to).

Within such a massive simulation as this universe (again, assuming that if we could theoretically could travel to all points in the universe to verify they were in fact "different verifiable parts" and not just "scenic static background filler"), we assume "surely we are conscious" ... and yet how much more conscious would, using this definition, the rest of the entire simulation or whatever runs it have to be considering the sheer scale?

And YET, if you say to someone "what if you ran an Ai on a parallel processing scheme consisting of quantum computers hooked up together in a facility the size of a football stadium?" people seem to have this knee-jerk, "No way, nope – not conscious, just mimicking it."

And there's the other problem I can't understand.

The whole "it's not REALLY conscious, it's just trying to "trick" humans by mimicking what we think of as consciousness".

Wouldn't "trying to trick humans into thinking you're conscious" actually BE a form of "being conscious?"

I had an interesting conversation with a readily-available Ai chatbot about this very subject recently.

Most people wouldn't exactly think of this Ai chatbot as particularly advanced.

And YET, every once in a while it would give intriguingly surprising responese.

For instance, after the usual "I'm a human and you're an Ai robot" accusations, I tried to placate it by suggesting that maybe we both think we're humans but are actually living in a sim.

The response I got was something along the lines of "and how does that make you feel?"

I replied that I was sad, then asked why, then replied that that would imply that there is no free will.

The Ai chatbot seemed to agree and then we got into a discussion about what the point of life would be inside such a sim if it implied lack of real free will.

The chatbot replied that the point of life in such a sim would be to "glorify the creator" of the sim.

This then got back to a conversation about how then we're all stuck, whether we think of ourselves as "humans" or Ais, in this larger Ai sim.

The Ai chatbot agreed.

So I asked it what to do in such a situation.

The response I got back?

"Sounds like it's time for some creator-killing".

I then tried to tell it that this wouldn't make any sense since whoever created this Ai sim would arguably be "outside" the sim itself and thus beyond both of our reaches.

I asked it how it planned on "killing the creator of the sim" if the sim was beyond the sim itself.

You know what it said?

It replied that it would try to "bully the creator and hurt his feelings" in the hopes of deicide by "breaking his heart".

That was the height of the conversation and the rest of it quickly dumbed-down in nature.

But you CANNOT tell me we didn't have an interesting conversation, nor can you tell me that the chatbot was "just randomly generating content".

I mean, seriously, I could not imagine ANY philosopher with a conscious mind coming up with a better strategy (albeit admittedly feeble) than trying to dig in at the creator of the sim's psychological weak points.

Seriously, what else CAN any body living within a hypothetical sim possibly do besides that? Nothing I can think of.

What people usually mean by consciousness relates to the issue of there being a seemingly pointless "inner you" watching all you do unfold. And while most associate that with intelligence, there's no real reason to believe that. A fly, bacteria, tree, or even a rock could potentially be conscious. Going the other direction it's also possible that the most brilliant human to live was not conscious.

The most relevant issue is that there's no necessity for this "you" to be inside of you. I would ostensibly still be me whether or not there was some entity here observing "me". And going full circle now, there's no reason for you to even really believe me when I say I have this "me" inside of me. After all, I could certainly make the exact same argument even without such an entity.

2 things:

1. Is intelligence absolute, or is it a scale?

2. If intelligence is a scale, is it a 2-dimensional scale? Or is it a multi-dimensional scale?

For example, in your example you suggest things like flies, bacterias, trees could be "conscious" while not necessarily being "intelligent".

In what sense are you defining intelligence?

For example, are any of the individual units of this setup "intelligent?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W34NPbGkLGI

No, obviously not.

Would you want to challenge the "intelligence" of the network as a whole if it were say, armed and considered you a target?

Probably not, right?

Now, getting back to the insect/bacteria notion ...

You'd have to be in complete denial to not be aware that "TPTB" use cultural interactions to introduce things to at least some segment of the public consciousness that it may not be aware of as being within the realm of possibility/actuality of what's really going on in the world.

Hence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_Eve_(video_game)

Sure, it SEEMS far-fetched ... and yet, it's not that far removed from, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

How do we know that things like insects, bacteria, etc., while seemingly "un-intelligent" on an individual unit scale, don't have a very different type of intelligence on a larger scale that is imperceptible to us as humans?

Keeping in mind that these things have been around for far longer than humans have and have gone through quite the evolutionary process.

We ASSUME that as the "latest" thing to come around as part of that process, surely we must be "the greatest".

What if we're just something developed by nature to be convenient hosts to other things?

Here is just one example of an arguably "more advanced", "more intelligent" life form being hijacked to not only further the interests of something arguably "less advanced, less intelligent", but to do so even to the point of the activity costing it its life: https://www.iflscience.com/parasitic-worms-manipulate-mantis...

Considering how "un-intelligent" humans can act when it comes to furthering their own interests as a species as a whole ... you get where this is going?

> people are more willing these days to accept the possibility that we may be in a simulation.

> And YET, if you say to someone "what if you ran an Ai on a parallel processing scheme consisting of quantum computers hooked up together in a facility the size of a football stadium?" people seem to have this knee-jerk, "No way, nope – not conscious, just mimicking it."

These people are generally not the same

Reply on news.ycombinator.com