5th Dinner – Bostrom’s Simulation Theory

The Invited Philosopher

Dawn

The Menu

1. Main Course: Grilled Salmon with Caribbean salsa, basmati rice, and oven-baked asparagus.
2. Dessert: Lime curd tart with lychee mango*
3. Drink: Riesling Wine from Lucio’s Wine Shop*

*Courtesy of Dawn

The Philosophy

As technology advances with inventions that sounded like sci-fi only 20 years ago, such as self-driving cars, space travel for tourism, neuron computer interfaces, ultra-realistic immersive video games and simulations, and more powerful GPU computers and soon quantum computers, you will see Oxford’s Philosopher Bostrom’s Theory of our life as a simulated reality discussed more frequently in the media. Soon the conversation will switch from “If” and “How” to “What” and “Why”. But Dawn and I, we are already there. See Bostrom’s short summary here, and read Computer Scientist Rizwan Virk’s compelling take on Bostrom’s theory. You may watch the movie The Matrix but a more obscure but equally relevant movie is ExistenZ.

The Summary

Bostrom considers the possibility that there will be a posthuman future in which humans have acquired the capacity to create virtual worlds that feel like the one we live in but with posthuman beings living in it. He defines posthuman as having the capacity to greatly exceed the maximum attainable health span, cognition and emotional capacity attained by any current human being without recourse to new technological means.

Bostrom argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

From his arguments for each case, it follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

Analysis

The If and the How

For practical and philosophical reasons, we did not spend too much time considering whether it is possible that we live in a simulation or video game. We preferred to ponder whether there is a benefit in believing in the simulation theory.  For practical purposes, we conflated both “situations”, simulation or video game, into one “virtual reality”, as both are virtual after all, and in both cases, what we see is created by a computer program.

Most of the articles out there focus on the If and the How. Bostrom himself focuses on that and does a good job at that, so just a brief explanation here suffices: A world like ours involves conscious experiences. People who do not understand the origin of conscious experiences and how the senses are connected to neurons, will “trust” their senses and believe this is all “for real”. But as Bostrom writes:

 It is not an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon-based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon-based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well.

The What

Bostrom writes that becoming posthuman means “You have just celebrated your 170th birthday and you feel stronger than ever. Each day is a joy. You have invented entirely new art forms, which exploit the new kinds of cognitive capacities and sensibilities you have developed. … You are communicating with your contemporaries using a language that has grown out of English over the past century and that has a vocabulary and expressive power that enables you to share and discuss thoughts and feelings that unaugmented humans could not even think or experience”

And so on.

During our dinner we did not focus on the future posthuman “What”, we instead focused on our current human “What”, our world, our simulation, now in Post-COVID 2021.

We are the posthumans to a civilization who perhaps had a lifespan of only 30 years, and had reduced expressive power but has acquired powerful technological capacity to enhance their lives by living through us. That is one theory we considered. That they live vicariously through us, as a character in a favorite TV or Netflix show, or a player character in a video game.

Dawn asked a great question: In the movie Existenz, the video game creator enjoys playing the virtual reality games she created, while her companion is a bit more reticent, but what if we don’t enjoy this game/virtual reality? And if we don’t enjoy it, will we get punished by the video game creator?

At some point she wondered if as a punishment we are taken out of the game if we are not a good “team player”. We agreed that this is a multi-player game. But Rizwan Virk discussed the possibility that some of us are “Player Characters” (PCs), meaning we have a human consciousness, and some are “Non-Player Characters” (NPCs), basically game characters with a computer-simulated consciousness.

We agreed there is no point in complaining about the game if we did not create it and we can’t leave.

I shared with her some rules of this virtual reality game we call life based on my own observations: (1) life is always creating new and varied forms (both living beings in nature and man-made objects) and possibilities, providing us with opportunities to react, and every reaction is a cause for a new form or possibility (Karma) (2) What we pay attention to, from all the manifested objects and possibilities is what creates our new reality, which is why “gratitude” is a key emotion for happiness (The law of attraction). This applies within certain limits that are rules that cannot be broken (for example gravity cannot be defied in “this” world) (3) because nature and humans are always in motion and changing, one rule is that humans have to “act” and “create” ( Exceptions are: couch potatoes and meditating monks, of which only one is happy) , (4) humans have a need to communicate with each other (or with NPCs) or with animals (NPCs?), (5) ancient spiritual books and philosophy books contain wisdoms that support rules 1-5 and make the case for a need for humans to examine their lives.  As Plato suggested in the Allegory of the Cave, it is the philosopher who questions his reality, who escapes the cave of ignorance.

The Why

We cannot possibly know the why unless there are clues. The clues are in the rules but not enough to understand the why. Bostrom argues that it is to attain a posthuman stage, an enhancement of the stage of some previous human civilization. Virk argues that it is an immersive computer game for the entertainment of players in a civilization that attained the technology to create this world.

Dawn had a good observation here and noted that if our world is a computer game then we should just play it well and figure out the rules to win the game, but if it is not a game, and we are being used, as in the movie the Matrix, because some entity or unknown entities are using us for energy, like a battery to power up their world, then we are in trouble.   In the book Philosophers Explore the Matrix, one philosopher argues that as long as our world provides us with joy and beauty, it is a sign that whoever created it does not want to harm us. Perhaps not, but they can still “use us”, and life can be very hard for the non-philosophers among us. The philosopher, however, draws pleasure from knowledge and wisdom, and from investigating the mysteries of life, including the possibility of a virtual reality called “life”. And who knows, perhaps that is the “Why”, to see who among us escapes Plato’s cave and finds wisdom.

 

See the world as yourself

– Tae Te Ching, verse 13