Strypey
"So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality... and there would probably be billions of... computers... boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions."
#MelonHusk, 2016
"Can you imagine that as recently as a few years ago, people used to sit around and nod along as they listened to this... bullshit?"
#ParisMarx, 2024
https://techwontsave.us/episode/247_data_vampires_fighting_for_control_episode_4
Strypey
Transhumanists like Melon Husk live in a model of reality where all depths are squashed up into their corresponding surfaces; what Wilber calls "flatland". In this model, humans are "philosophical zombies", who only think we are conscious beings;
https://jaronlanier.com/zombie.html
In flatland, consciousness is a trick reality plays on us with our brains, and/or other purely material phenomena. So as soon as we can simulate enough of those, we can make a consciousness-in-a-bottle.
(4/?)
Strypey
In A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber posits that reality consists not only of "surfaces that can be measured" - the realm of the sciences - but also "depths that must be interpreted". The realms of the arts and ethics.
If this model is even vaguely correct, we can measure heads and brains all we want, as well as the EM fields surrounding them, and even aspects of cognition. But none of that will ever allow a psychologist to tell someone how they feel, rather than having to ask.
(3/?)
Strypey
Despite all the increases in the graphical resolution of computer games (mainly by increasing the number of transistors used to run them), we've yet to get NPCs that simulate intelligence. Let alone *consciousness*.
Mainly because we don't yet have a scientific model of what consciousness *is*, or how it works. If we don't even begin to understand it's mechanisms (if indeed it has any), how can we simulate them?
So is this a tractable science problem requiring only time? I suspect not.
(2/?)
Strypey
Melon Husk has made *so* many illogical leaps here. The most obvious one being that simulated computer game characters will one day be capable of experiencing themselves subjectively. Because otherwise there's nowhere else we could be, but "base reality", as he puts it.
Is computer science going to achieve that? It seems unlikely, mainly because there are good reasons to think it might be philosophically impossible. Let's unpack this a bit.
(1/?)
Hyolobrika
Strypey
What we're really looking at here, among those who want to 'upload to The Cloud', is a kind of mental illness. A narcissistic ego addiction. Like all addictions, it consumes the life of the addict, and anyone else who let's them get too close.
Which would just be sad and pathetic, if it wasn't an existential threat to the rest of us.
(9/9)
Strypey
All of which helps to explain why people like Melon Husk are happy to emit any amount of carbon in pursuit of developing "AI". Because like the characters in Ben Elton novels like Stark and This Other Eden, they're not trying to save the human race and the biosphere we depend on. They're trying to survive it.
They are the pyramid builders of our time. Obscenely powerful people, who can think of nothing better to do with their power than trying to make themselves immortal.
(8/?)
Strypey
Put this way, it's clear that what we have here is not scientific futurism, but fundamentalist religion. The idea that we already live in a simulation, because 'probability', is based in the dogmas of this religion. Like other religions that can't wait for the Rapture, it's profoundly anti-life.
(7/?)
Strypey
However, in the fever dreams of transhumanists, once we can accurately simulate consciousness, we can simulate *our own* consciousness. Then we can "upload" it to The Cloud, and live forever in digital heaven.
This is, as Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic) and Charles Stross (@cstross) put it in the title of their co-written sci fi novel, The Rapture of the Nerds.
(6/?)
Strypey
The obvious counterargument is; no matter how much better our simulations of fluid dynamics in water get, they never get any wetter. "Wetness", it seems, is a property of reality that can't be digitally simulated.
Similarly, no matter how perfect your simulation of cognition, there's no reason to think it will ever be conscious. At best, you're creating high-resolution digital ghosts. Which may freak out the living, but do nothing whatsoever to extend the life of the person simulated.
(5/?)
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