Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

I think you just pointed out the very paradox which illustrates my point: In which category do you place something that cannot belong to any category?

At this point you might want to say that I'm just making up an artificial nonexistent construct that has no bearing on reality and my task would be to show that not only does it exist, but it is the very basis necessary for all categories to exist. This thread would probably not suffice to achieve that :-) And by the way, I don't see it as supernatural - if anything, the process of concepts and objects created by an agent to approximate reality and then taking these approximations to be reality is what I find to be supernatural. It amazes me how evolution managed to pull this off...

>The fact that it feels like something to see red or blue? That's just sensation + emotional response.

I'm suggesting that "just sensation" is a placeholder for "I have no idea what that is"... There's a big difference between the explanation of a process and the experiencing of a process. We are so quick to categorise experiences into concepts and relationships between them that we overlook the fact that the sensory experience exists before any conceptualisation and categorisation, and in a way is much more real than any story we mould it into some milliseconds later (i.e "this is red", "this is cold" etc.)

>So the substrate of consciousness is not the brain, but the "game".

By now you probably realise (though I assume still disagree with me) that I see it the other way around: i.e that no concept can exist without knowing it. This is not the same as saying nothing exists without our knowledge, but it does mean that what exists before our knowledge of it remains by definition undefinable and inscrutable.

How could something created by a body not belong to any category? It belongs to the category of self-regulated systems adapting to their environment.

Creating concepts has been demonstrated since 2012 (Google 'cat detector' https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/). In natural language processing, Andrej Karpathy demonstrated in his char-RNN blogpost the emergence of neurons specialized in various concepts (http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/). It happens naturally in deep networks, as lower layer features are combined into higher level features.

> I'm suggesting that "just sensation" is a placeholder for "I have no idea what that is"...

Ah sorry, I didn't mean "sensation" as in "placeholder for no idea". I meant it as a neural net, the kind we have in our vision system, or the kind used in Deep Learning. They are made of millions of neurons and trained on millions of images to distinguish and localize objects and object relations in images. We have had thousands of papers optimizing on this kind of architecture - Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) - arguably the most successful part of deep learning. Not only that "sensation" was a neural net, but "emotional response" is also a neural net that computes scores of utility of states and actions.

So I was referring to concrete concepts. That's what I like about RL compared to philosophy - it replaces vague concepts with concrete models.

We can divide up the task of running a physical simulation into the part where the state is computed, and the part where the results are made visible to us in a way we understand.

We can also divide computation up into the same two pieces: the actual solving of the problem, and then the task of reading symbols off the Turing tape. Usually, we set up our definitions so that a program isn't thought to "solve" a problem unless the reading-the-answer part is trivial.

Now, for a person living inside a simulation, the reading-the-answer part would become insignificant. Why do they care if we can see in to their universe?

So, if all we want is to make a world for simulated people to live in, why not stuff all of the computational complexity into the reading-the-answer part, and then not do it? They would be perfectly happy with a jumbled-up, uninterpretable state in our world, because they would be living on the inside where it made sense.

So, if that is convincing, then allow me to pitch my universe simulating computer:

Launch two photons into space. The distance between them is the state of the simulation. If you want to look in to the state, you have to solve an incredibly hard exponential problem to map the distance to a certain corresponding wavefunction that you could make sense out of.

However, the inhabitants wouldn't care about whether or not you interpreted their state. So, as far as the simulated are concerned, two photons flying apart do make a simulation!

In my opinion the easiest way to make this reductio-ad-absurdum go away is to reject the idea that the simulated is real.