Re: WHY COLONIZE OUTER SPACE
- From: jak1949@xxxxxxxxx (Jack McKinney)
- Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2009 05:00:54 -0500
SETH: In a very real manner, space as you perceive it simply does not
exist. Not only is the illusion of space caused by your own physical
perceptive mechanisms, but it is also caused by mental patterns that you
have accepted- patterns that are adopted by consciounesss when it
reaches a certain point of evolution within your system.
Your planetary systems exists at once, simultaneously, both in time and
in space. The universe that you seem to perceive, either visually or
through instruments, appears to be composed of galaxies, stars, and
planets, at various distances from you. Basically, however this is an
illusion. Your senses and your very existence as physical creatures
program you to perceive the universe in such a way. The universe as you
know it is your interpertation of events as they intrude upon your
three-dimensional reality. The events are mental. This does not mean
that you cannot travel to other planets, for example, within that
physical universe, any more than it means that you cannot use tables to
hold books, although the table has no solid qualities of its own.
* * * * * *
Are We Trapped in God's Video Game? (Discover Magazine)
Jaron Lanier -- There are certain questions about virtual reality (VR)
that I've been asked a few times a day, every day, for over a quarter
century. The e-mails still come in, from a kid in Korea or a grandmother
in Australia: Will VR ever get so good that we will no longer be able to
tell it's VR? Is it possible we are already living in VR? Recently even
The New York Times got into the act, interpreting an argument from
philosopher Nick Bostrom to mean that "it is almost a mathematical
certainty that we are living in someone else's computer simulation."
When these questions come up, I usually try to redirect the inquirer's
attention to the world of actual VR research, because that topic is
richer than most people realize. But readers of this column know I am as
friendly as can be to weird speculations, and it is interesting to think
about the metaphysical side of virtual reality. The concept of "VR so
good you can't tell" can mean different things. It might mean that a
person who started off in natural reality can be fooled by a simulation,
or it might mean that a being who was created as part of a simulation
can become conscious. Let's consider the second possibility. Can
consciousness arise inside a computer simulation? As it happens, I'm
that rare creature, a cybernetic daredevil who is usually a dualist: I
get thrills from figuring out how to make computer programs reproduce
tricks the brain can do, and yet I often believe consciousness is
something special that cannot be simulated like other phenomena. Suppose
I'm wrong, though, and a simulated character can become conscious. Could
it know it is living in a simulation?....
Robotics researcher Hans Moravec originated the argument that we are
probably already living in VR: If it is possible to build virtual
realities sophisticated enough to give rise to sentient residents, it's
likely there would be many such VRs. After all, once we built the first
car or the first laptop computer, millions upon millions more followed.
(And even if humanity never builds superlative VR machines, some alien
civilization somewhere will do it, if it is possible.) If you are a
self-aware creature, then, there are two possibilities: You live in
natural reality, or you live in one of these super-VRs. Since there is
only one of the former and a lot of the latter, the chances are quite
strong that you, and indeed all of us, are living in a simulated world.
Although this pseudostatistical style of reasoning doesn't prove
anything, it does say something about the relative likelihood of a
particular metaphysical truth. That may seem like a strange way to
think, but an even stranger development, to my mind, is that recent
results may give us empirical evidence about whether we are living in a
simulation. If you believe that thinking about metaphysics in a
pseudostatistical way is sensible, then these results make it seem much
less likely that we're living in a VR than it did back when people first
started asking me those questions.....
When Moravec first made his case back in the 1980s, the popular way of
thinking was that there is ONE AND ONLY ONE natural reality. These days,
that answer is becoming less popular all the time, because of a
seemingly unrelated field: quantum computation. Experiments over the
past decade show that quantum computers (which process information using
the quantum states of particles rather than transistors) really can
work. And as it happens, one interpretation of quantum mechanics that
used to be somewhat obscure has suddenly become popular because it's
better adapted for explaining quantum computation, at least to human
brains.....
I'm speaking, of course, of the many worlds interpretation. In this
view, each world has a copy of your quantum computer, and they all run
at once; that's why they outperform regular computers that can function
in only one reality. When you get an answer out, it's the same thing as
discovering which of the many worlds you are in. The rising fortunes of
the many worlds interpretation seem to have emboldened champions of
other ideas about multiple realities. Some string theorists now talk
about a "landscape" of realities in which physics is different in each
reality. Cosmologist Max Tegmark and the late philosopher David Lewis
have offered yet other ways of thinking about many realities instead of
one....
You might object that even if there are a large number of realities,
there still ought to be many more VRs, because each reality could have
many VRs inside it. But that's not so. Many of the multiple-realities
theories suggest an unbounded number of worlds, and if the number of
realities can be infinite, then there can't be more VRs than realities;
infinity is as many as there can be. Even if there are only a finite
number of realities, there is no guarantee that each reality would host
VRs. Virtual realities take up time, energy, and space?and a given
reality has limited supplies of those things. All of this suggests that
VRs are unlikely to be more common than natural realities. Of course,
this whole discussion begs the question of what we mean when we
distinguish a VR from a natural reality. If a simulation is perfect in
every way, it is by definition indistinguishable from the thing it
simulates. So there must be some difference between a natural reality
and a virtual one, or else there's nothing virtual about it. Maybe the
VR is self-evidently low resolution. The ones we can build today
certainly are! But that's not the only possible difference. The usual
sort of difference that people are interested in is the existence of an
entity that can look into the lives of players in the VR, a powerful
player who is usually but not necessarily hidden. It's similar to
believing in a god. The rhetoric of VR thought experiments often plays
up this angle. Some people imagine this creature as a pimply nerd in the
sky who is running a cosmic copy of The Sims, who are us. Perhaps with
that image in mind, one woman commented to me that she worried that this
being might be able to see whether her underwear was clean on a given
day....
A pimply video-game-playing kid is an especially unlikely "god" ruling
over our reality.Strangely enough, there are some recent empirical
results that may influence whether we should believe in this
underwear-obsessed dude. Before I describe them, though, I need to
introduce the idea of a spectrum of possible gods, running from wimpy to
omnipotent. All the supernatural beings of religion and science fiction
fit somewhere on the spectrum....
The very wimpiest god can hypothetically see into our world but can't do
anything at all to interact with us in any way, in any world?including
hypothetical afterlives. As far as we're concerned, it's meaningless to
think of this god as one who exists. The second-wimpiest god might be
able to perform just a trick or two that seem supernatural to us, but
underwear spying is just one trick of many, and therefore unlikely.
Paradoxically, pseudostatistical reasoning suggests that the most
omnipotent god won't notice your underwear, either. Such a god can see
and manipulate all possible versions of you and your world (including
your wearing clean, filthy, or no underwear at all). If there is
something special enough about your underwear to merit notice, there's
another version of you in another reality wearing even more special
underwear. The Top God is infinitely less likely to focus on the
particular pair of underwear you are wearing today than you are likely
to focus on a particular grain of sand on a beach. He is just as moot as
the weakest god....
So as far as underwear spying goes, it's only those gods in the middle
of the spectrum who should concern us. A god who spies would do so,
presumably, only if he (or she for that matter) experiences surprise at
the unveiling of the future and is able to see into only a narrow range
of realities. The Greek gods were like this. The empirical results that
influence how we might think about God-as-video-game-player are the
successful demonstrations of quantum cryptography, in which a sender and
receiver can be assured that no natural observer has eavesdropped on a
message. This system works because a component of the message is ruined
by quantum effects as soon as it is read. For a god to eavesdrop on a
quantum cryptography session and then cover his tracks, would, as it
happens, require near omnipotence. When the first quantum cryptography
experiments were done, I felt a little relieved and sad at the same
time, because we then knew that one kind of potential exotic or
supernatural form of life that might have been watching us either did
not exist or wasn't paying
attention......
Continuing the pseudostatistical arguments, a god that can exist only
within a narrow portion of the spectrum of possible gods is less likely
than a god that can exist over a larger portion of the spectrum. The
game-playing kid feels the squeeze from both ends. He has to be both
weak enough to be able to focus on a particular pair of underwear and
strong enough to be able to cover his tracks after eavesdropping on a
quantum cryptography session?or else be willing not to peek at any
messages we decide to keep secret.....
That probably?no guarantees?places him within a razor-thin niche on
a wide spectrum of possible gods. So I can't swear that we're not living
in a simulation, but I can offer some assurance: A pimply virtual
reality operator is an especially unlikely god.
.
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- Re: A WEB OF PROBABILITIES
- From: Jack McKinney
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