In the 17th century, French polymath, Rene Descartes, famously never got out of bed before noon. Those were his productive hours and he made good use of them. He is credited with being one of the first to abandon the precepts of Aristotelian scholasticism. “So what?” you might say, but it was a big deal and a brave thing to do given the uncertain scientific tenor of the times. He also developed analytical geometry thus forcing future generations to draw lines on graph paper to find “x”. His mathematical work and treatises about motion were precursors to the subsequent work of Sir Isaac Newton. He established the laws of reflection and refraction and was the first to postulate that mind and body are separate thus establishing the autonomous nature of human reason. He was a busy guy.
Rene lived in interesting times and, because of his wide-ranging thoughts, spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic due to their tolerant attitude towards his paradigm shifting, scientific and philosophical ideas. He fought for the Dutch in the Thirty Years War as a French Catholic and was no doubt “finding x” as he sighted and aimed the cannon fire.
We know him most for his philosophy of skepticism that enquired into the nature of consciousness, truth, reality and the knowability of God. He boiled this all down to his brilliant sound bite, “Cogito, ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am.” Finally! A philosophical statement that does not require a three premise syllogism to prove a theorem! It is almost as elegant as F = ma. The reason I bring this up is because M. Descartes’ axiom goes straight to the heart of the current argument about human consciousness.
Another busy guy who lives in interesting times is Nick Bostrom, a Swedish born philosopher who teaches at the University of Oxford in England. Dr. Bostrom is featured in several TED talks all of which are interesting. His area of expertise includes the impact of Artificial Intelligence and, unlike Yuval Harari, he is more glum about its prospects. This is what his Wikipedia entry has to say,
“He [Bostrom] believes an existential risk to humanity from superintelligence would be immediate once brought into being, thus creating an exceedingly difficult problem of finding out how to control such an entity before it actually exists… In January 2015, Bostrom joined Stephen Hawking among others in signing the Future of Life Institute’s open letter warning of the potential dangers of AI .”
The area of Bostom’s research which is of most interest to me is his theorem that there is a one hundred percent probability that we are living in a simulation established by advanced humans living many years in the future. It sounds crazy so stay with me. Unlike the brevity of M. Descartes, his trilemma goes like this:
the probability that advanced humans will one day be able to run advanced ancestor simulations is 100%.
the probability that advanced humans will one day be able to run advanced ancestor simulations but choose not to is 0%.
the probability that people with our kind of experiences are living in a simulation is 100%.
His argument is that advanced peoples will have access to computers whose processing power surpasses that of the human brain. As a result, these advanced peoples will be able to create simulated worlds and the number of simulacrum or conscious robots will be greater than the number of real people. Due to the nature of advanced computing, which is more powerful than the human brain, the people in the simulations will be conscious and believe that they are real. Cogito, ergo sum. From this he concludes that, since these advanced simulacra will outnumber real people, there is a high chance the we, living today, are actually robots in a simulation. You can take the red pill or the blue pill.
If he is right, then how do we know if we are real or avatars in a simulation? Was the movie The Matrix a signal to us sent from renegade and sympathetic, future advanced people? Maybe we are actually hanging in a placental sac with our brains wired in series to create a super brain while automatons live life for us. Maybe Descartes was a robot planted among us to confuse what is really going on.
But who says that a simulated robot will become conscious? This Kurzweilian leap of logic is an assertion with not much data to support it. If you mumble the machine conscious part, then it is possible to scare folks with the implications. I don’t know that Bostrom associates himself with the WEF but, based on one of his TED talks, he believes that if we can imagine it, we can make it happen. This makes him a “name it and claim it” heretic. Here is what he says we can claim.
much longer, healthier lives
greater subjective well being.
enhanced cognitive capacities, more knowledge and understanding.
Unlimited opportunity for personal growth beyond our current biological limits.
better relationships.
unbounded potential for spiritual/moral/intellectual development.
The next statement, so far unspoken, becomes, “You will own nothing and be happy.” If you are interested in how the logic works, then check out an interesting and recent lecture at Oxford Union by Peter Thiel.
In researching Dr. Bostrom’s ideas, I had a feeling of deja vu. Is it possible that the idea of our living in a simulation is already, well-tilled ground? C.S. Lewis describes our time on earth as an intimation of a future world that we will enter as either unimaginably powerful and beautiful beings or as such ugly cretins that no one can stand to gaze upon us. If, as Lewis argues, that future world is the real one, then the current world is the not-real one so perhaps it is a simulation that prepares us for what is to come. If Heaven and Hell are real and eternal then surely our three score and ten years of a simulation on this planet are not that significant.
I can hear the scoffing but a celebrated and well educated philosophy professor draws large crowds of people to hear him explain that we are living in a simulation created by our machine conscious, super human descendants who live far in the future. All that I am suggesting is that he has the order wrong. Instead of working from the future backwards, the eternal, omniscient super Being works from the past forward as He walks us through a simulation, preparatory to entering a future eternity. Time is only meaningful in the simulation. Is that so different from Dr. Bostrom?
It is very different, actually. Dr. Bostrom has no evidence for his thesis and bases it on an assertion that can’t be proven. Machines becoming conscious are the things of Isaac Asimov movies and not the scientific method. His ideas are interesting but only in the way that Hobbits and Orcs are interesting.
What about my idea? What if I told you that the eternal, omniscient super being became a human, lived on earth, died, and returned from the dead and that all this was well recorded by contemporary witnesses? Would you be interested in hearing a bit more?
I am fascinated by Dr. Bostrom’s trilemma. With a little tweaking, it fits Dr. Lewis’ observation that we sometimes get glimpses of the real world from within our simulation. The real world (to come) is only a dystopia if we ignore or come to the wrong conclusion about Jesus. It is something to think about.
Now have your say. Hit the like button or leave me a comment. Otherwise it is lonely in my part of the simulation!
If the being(s) creates the simulation does it not run forward in time from the moment of boot up?
Truly amazing how these apparently brilliant people believe the craziest things. I guess it is an attempt to NOT believe the C.S. Lewis version, which requires a great deal more responsibility from the beings in the simulation.