January 08, 2015
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Prof. Johnson takes us on a brisk walk through the not-understood. What is mind? How am I the same person as my 8-year-old self? Which arguments for the existence of God hold up, if any? All right, space isn”t a kind of stuff: but is space-time a kind of stuff? What’s up with Schrödinger’s cat?
He ends with a discussion of the simulation argument of philosopher Nick Bostrom, which has, for my money, a kind of creepy plausibility.
Bostrom argues, with good logic, that as our ability to manipulate data advances from the trifling gigabytes and terabytes of today to the xona-, weka-, and vunda-bytes of tomorrow, our transhuman descendants, or those of some other technological civilization, will be able to create whole-world computer simulations like the Matrix, feeding vunda-bytes of made-up virtual reality data to conscious agents, whatever they are.
(What are they? Just working brains, perhaps”simulated mind emerging from simulated matter. Or perhaps conscious agents are prior to everything”pure idealism. Cog-sci boffin Donald Hoffman of U.C. Irvine gave a fascinating presentation along these lines at last year’s “Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference.)
One of three things must be true, says Bostrom. Either no civilization makes it to that “sim lord” level; or some do, but none has any interest in creating “ancestor simulations”; or we are living in just such a simulation.
Bostrom even speculates that the sim lords may themselves be living in a simulation, controlled presumably by super sim lords, who in turn … you get the idea. It may be simulations all the way down!
That’s where my puddingy Anglo-Saxon distaste for metaphysics reasserts itself and I bail out. Time to make another table.
