Physicists To Test If Universe Is A Computer Simulation

But that's equally true of saying "complexity doesn't make something intelligent and conscious". All right, then what does? "Not complex" is a label just as much as "complex" is. Either way you haven't explained anything. That's what I was trying to get at.

Also, saying "complexity doesn't make something intelligent/conscious" is not the same as saying "something intelligent/conscious doesn't have to be complex", which is what I think the statement I originally responded to, taken in context, was really intended to mean. Do you really think intelligence and consciousness can be present in simple things like rocks? Might there not be a reason that the human brain is three pounds of complex matter, not three pounds of jello?

Anyways in the original context of where I said that, I was trying to come up with a satisfactory way to distinguish consciousness from non-consciousness. Complexity obviously isn't the way since lots of complex things are not conscious. It may be that all conscious things are also complex. But then complexity isn't the reason it's conscious, it just happens to correlate with it.

Setting a variable in a computer equal to "happy" obviously doesn't make the computer experience happiness. But then what possible sequence of commands and state changes would? If you accept that there is no possible sequence that would, then you have to accept that humans can not experience consciousness either. Because for all we know we are running in a computer too. Even if we are not, the process our brain follows easily could. The fact that it runs on atoms bouncing into each other and not electrons flowing through logic gates makes no difference.

I think you've come much closer than I to getting a definition of consciousness, but I still don't find it satisfactory. You could have a computer mimic a human without actually having anything resembling an inner "human experience". For example, a giant look up table with a preprogrammed response to any possible input. We have created extremely simple versions of this that are almost effective enough to pass the turing test. Just by gather a large number of human responses to chatbots. Though you could say the process that creates the giant look up table is intelligent, the table itself obviously is not.

There are AIs like AIXI which could be vastly intelligent without reasonably being considered conscious. They don't actually "think" so much as brute-force every possible solution to a given problem, or every possible explanation for a series of inputs, etc. Given enough computing power this would actually be effective. You could then ask it to mimic a conscious being and it could do so easily (given either a definition of consciousness or a set of observations about other conscious beings.) Maybe doing that requires the intelligence to actually simulate a conscious process somewhere along the line, so I don't know if that counts. It may be able to do so through mere, without having to actually run a full simulation. Providing a "deep insight" about life is nowhere near as complicated as a full human consciousness.

Maybe there is no such thing as consciousness. In the sense that there is no simple way to define it that is fully consistent with everything we want it to mean. That there are always going to be arbitrary seeming exceptions and gray areas. But that has deep and disturbing implications for morality. Maybe it's not relevant to our day to day life, but if we ever want to program a friendly artificial intelligence, we are screwed.

>I think it's silly or meaningless to say we possibly -- or probably! -- live in an "artificial" universe.

Well assuming that there are more simulated beings in all of existence, whatever that means, than there are non-simulated ones, it is very likely we are simulations. Though it's impossible to know what exists beyond our own universe. What is the distribution of universes? Do 50% of universes allow for infinite computing power, for example? What programming language do they use, which would determine how many bits a given universe would take to specify in that language, and therefore how often it gets simulated? How many universes even have anything close to intelligent beings?

An infinitely powerful computer would allow you to simulate every possible universe all at once, instantly (you would also be able to simulate every possible branch of non-deterministic universes, continuous variables, time travelling, and other things that people claim makes the universe "uncomputable.) And you could instantly do it an infinite number of times. If it were possible for such a thing to exist in a universe, that universe would contain every other possible universe. Including copies of itself and others universes with infinite computing power, which would contain more universes, etc.

(Very interesting short story that explains the implications of this http://qntm.org/responsibility)

So what is the top level universe? Why does something exist rather than nothing? Perhaps everything that can exist does exist. Maybe every computable program has been (is being?) run, including one that specifies our universe. That's the simplest possible explanation that explains the existence of the universe. Though I can not wrap my head around why something exists rather than nothing. None of this has any practical implications for our daily life, and the answer is probably unknowable, but it bothers me.

Sorry for going off on such a tangent. I hope this is comprehensible, as I know philosophical writings rarely are.

The problem is that both of these terms are really too vague. What do you mean by "consciousness"? Some people claim insects are conscious; some claim bacteria are conscious; some even claim electrons are conscious.

Also, what do you mean by "intelligence"? By some definitions, the process of evolution by natural selection is "intelligent".

If by these terms, you mean "the properties humans have that we call consciousness and intelligence", then why do you think there is no connection between them? Does your own intelligence really have nothing to do with your consciousness? Or vice versa?

It's conceivable you could create something like a human with very simple machinery, just massively scaled up.

Conceivable, yes. Likely, I don't think so. But that's really a matter of opinion; it depends on how much of the complexity in the parts of the human brain (neurons, chemicals, etc.) is necessary for human consciousness or intelligence, and how much you think is just an artifact of the implementation, so to speak. We don't know enough about how the brain works yet to really judge.

the end result may be complex, but the algorithm that creates it is not.

In other words, the complexity is still there.

That complex seeming behavior can "emerge" from simple rules and a simple process.

Wait a minute--complex seeming? Or complex?

If you're trying to argue that the complexity may not be in the algorithm itself, but only in the actual working out of the algorithm in time and space, I'll buy that.

But if you're trying to argue that it isn't "really" complex because the algorithm is simple, I don't buy that. I never said the algorithm had to be complex; I just said there has to be complexity somewhere for there to be (human-level, to avoid all the definitional issues I raised above) consciousness and intelligence. That's perfectly consistent with the complexity ultimately being built out of simple parts--just a lot of them with a lot of interactions, so the complexity is in the interactions, not in the parts themselves.

(I think it's likely that the parts themselves have significant complexity too, as I said above, but even if that's true, there will still be some lower level, possibly much lower, where there are simple parts, just a huge, huge number of them with a lot of interactions.)

>In other words, the complexity is still there.

Well yes in a way. By the definitions used in information theory, complexity is just the amount of bits you need to accurately describe something in some language. By common usage complexity just means the amount of concepts you need to learn to understand something (about the same thing.) But it can also mean the number of moving parts a machine has, so to speak, which could be very large while simple enough to understand or write on paper. Like a computer display which has a few thousand pixels each of which is almost exactly the same.

I don't know if you would call a computer display complicated, at least not much moreso than the invidual pixels that make it up. The same is probably true of humans. Even if humans are fairly complicated, someday a connectionist approach or maybe a rough approximation of a human brain might succeed at creating something arguably conscious.

>If you're trying to argue that the complexity may not be in the algorithm itself, but only in the actual working out of the algorithm in time and space, I'll buy that.

This may be a much better way of describing what I just said above. So yeah.