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New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

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Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#81

Post by gcost »

qayxc wrote: post #45
mw67 wrote: post #9

Funny people still call that "simulation hypothesis". At some point they should try to do some Past lives regressions or Out of body experience (astral projection). Then they'll know for sure what this reality is about.

I would consider this if someone was able to demonstrate a way to distinguish these phenomena from altered states of mind (i.e. hallucinations). We know and can demonstrate that the human psyche can easily be manipulated in various ways (psychological manipulation, drugs, magnetic fields, sleep depravation, stress, etc.) to cause such experiences. Some actual evidence for for "past life regressions" and "astral proje…

PLR is real, read the works of Michael newton and others. Over 8000 PRL from people of all kind of age and background describe the same things happening once we pass on the other side. Definitely not hallucinations. Actually scary how people still think that instead of exploring for themselves.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#82

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

jsenn wrote: post #53
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that it's not that complicated. That if something meets the below five criteria, we must accept that it is conscious: (1) It maintains a persisting internal model of an environment, updated from ongoing input. (2) It maintains a persisting internal model of its own body or vehicle as bounded and situated in that environment. (3) It possesses a memory that binds past and present into a single temporally exte…

If you remove the terms "self", "agency", and "trivially reducible", it seems to me that a classical robot/game AI planning algorithm, which no one thinks is conscious, matches these criteria. How do you define these terms without begging the question?

If anything has, minimally, a robust spatiotemporal sense of itself, and can project that sense forward to evaluate future outcomes, then it has a robust "self."

What this requires is a persistent internal model of: (A) what counts as its own body/actuators/sensors (a maintained self–world boundary), (B) what counts as its history in time (a sense of temporal continuity), and (C) what actions it can take (degrees of freedom, i.e. the future branch space), all of which are continuously used to regulate behavior under genuine epistemic uncertainty. When (C) is robust, abstraction and generalization fall out naturally. This is, in essence, sapience.

By "not trivially reducible," I don't mean "not representable in principle." I mean that, at the system's own operative state/action abstraction, its behavior is not equivalent to executing a fixed policy or static lookup table. It must actually perform predictive modeling and counterfactual evaluation; collapsing it to a reflex table would destroy the very capacities above. (It's true that with an astronomically large table you can "look up" anything -- but that move makes the notion of explanation vacuous.)

Many robots and AIs implement pieces of this pipeline (state estimation, planning, world models,) but current deployed systems generally lack a robust, continuously updated self-model with temporally deep, globally integrated counterfactual control in this sense.

If you want to simplify it a bit, you could just say that you need a robust and bounded spatial-temporal sense, coupled to the ability to generalize from that sense.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#83

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

squibonpig wrote: post #76
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that it's not that complicated. That if something meets the below five criteria, we must accept that it is conscious: (1) It maintains a persisting internal model of an environment, updated from ongoing input. (2) It maintains a persisting internal model of its own body or vehicle as bounded and situated in that environment. (3) It possesses a memory that binds past and present into a single temporally exte…

I don't think any of these need to lead to qualia for any obvious reason. It could be a p-zombie why not.

The zombie intuition comes from treating qualia as an "add-on" rather than as the internal presentation of a self-model.

"P-zombie" is not a coherent leftover possibility once you fix the full physical structure. If a system has the full self-model (temporal-spatial sense) / world-model / memory binding / counterfactual evaluator / control loop, then that structure is what having experience amounts to (no extra ingredient need be added or subtracted).

I hope I don't later get accused of plagiarizing myself, but let's embark on a thought experiment. Imagine a bitter, toxic alkaloid that does not taste bitter. Suppose ingestion produces no distinctive local sensation at all – no taste, no burn, no nausea. The only "response" is some silent parameter in the nervous system adjusting itself, without crossing the threshold of conscious salience. There are such cases: Damaged nociception, anosmia, people congenitally insensitive to pain. In every such case, genetic fitness is slashed. The organism does not reliably avoid harm.

Now imagine a different design. You are a posthuman entity whose organic surface has been gradually replaced. Instead of a tongue, you carry an in‑line sensor which performs a spectral analysis of whatever you take in. When something toxic is detected, a red symbol flashes in your field of vision: “TOXIC -- DO NOT INGEST.” That visual event is a quale. It has a minimally structured phenomenal character -- colored, localized, bound to alarm -- and it stands in for what once was bitterness.

We can push this further. Instead of a visual alert, perhaps your motor system simply locks your arm; perhaps your global workspace is flooded with a gray, oppressive feeling; perhaps a sharp auditory tone sounds in your private inner ear. Each variant is still a mode of felt response to sensory information. Here's what I'm getting at with this: There is no way for a conscious creature to register and use risky input without some structure of "what it is like" coming along for the ride.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#84

Post by kpga »

"Example 1. ... After this you physically isolate isolate your laptop, from the rest of the Universe, and start running it..."

However there is no way "you can physically isolate isolate your laptop, from the rest of the Universe" so doesn't that refute this example (at least?)

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#85

Post by stevesimmons »

blovescoffee wrote: post #57
vasco wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain further? Maybe I'm too out of this scope but if you want to simulate Universe X plus the computer Y that simulates X then you'd need at least 1 extra bit of memory (likely way more) to encompass the simulation plus the computation running the simulation (X+Y). The computer running the simulation by definition is not part of the simulation, so how can it be that it can truly simulate itself?

Not quite, compression enables you to simulate / represent / encode x data with less than x memory.

Only for those inputs that are compressible.

If a compressor can compress every input of length N bits into fewer than N bits, then at least 2 of the 2^N possible inputs have the same output. Thus there cannot exist a universal compressor.

Modify as desired for fractional bits. The essential argument is the same.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#86

Post by measurablefunc »

daoboy wrote: post #19

I always feel like these frameworks rely on a semantic sleight of hand that sounds plausible on the surface, but when you drill down a bit they render words like 'simulation' 'reality' or 'truth' as either unintelligible or trite, depending on how you define them.

They're defined relative to the axioms. In this case he is using the standard arithmetic & set theoretic constructions to define the terms & functions he's talking about. It's logically sound, whether it makes physical sense or not is another matter.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#87

Post by measurablefunc »

therobots927 wrote: post #70

“ Wolpert shows that this isn’t required by the mathematics: simulations do not have to degrade, and infinite chains of simulated universes remain fully consistent within the theory.” How is this consistent with the second law of thermodynamics? If there is one universe containing an infinite number of simulations (some of which simulate the base universe) wouldn’t there be a limit to how much computation could be co…

Standard theory of computation is not concerned about entropy or physical realizability. It's just arithmetic & lookup tables defined w/ set theoretic axioms.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#88

Post by flufluflufluffy »

The whole “simulation hypothesis” thing has always irked me. To me, the question of whether our universe was [“intentionally” “created” by some other “being(s)”] vs [“naturally” happened] is meaningless. Whatever it was on the other side is way too insanely unfathomable to be classified into those 2 human-created ideas. Ugh the whole thing is so self-centered.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#89

Post by morpheos137 »

flufluflufluffy wrote: post #88

The whole “simulation hypothesis” thing has always irked me. To me, the question of whether our universe was [“intentionally” “created” by some other “being(s)”] vs [“naturally” happened] is meaningless. Whatever it was on the other side is way too insanely unfathomable to be classified into those 2 human-created ideas. Ugh the whole thing is so self-centered.

It appeals to sophomoric modern atheists who can't comprehend that infinity and nothing exists at the same time. People seek a reason "why" not realizing the question is the answer. The universe exists because 'why not?' because Infinity seeks to prevail over nothing. Nothing strikes at the heel of infinity. The truth is not in these lines or that theory but betwixt here and there and once "you" realize it, it realizes "you." Because it is you and you are it for it is itself. This may sound like my mumbo jumbo woo but once you know it knows you know it knows you know.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#90

Post by whatever1 »

GistNoesis wrote: post #50

The problem of computers is the problem of time : How to obtain a consistent causal chain ! The classical naive way of obtaining a consistent causal chain, is to put the links one after the other following the order defined by the simulation time. The funnier question is : can it be done another way ? With the advance of generative AI, and things like diffusion model it's proven that it's possible theoretically (univ…

Causality also is not a universal thing. Some things just coexist and obey to some laws.

Does the potential cause current? No, they coexist.

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