I'd like to explore with you a little thought-experiment, which hopefully either opens a few minds, or at least gets them off each others' throats for a while. Yes, boys and girls, this is another atheist vs creation argument, but this time I'm going to try and play devil's advocate and let you think for yourself. Discussion is encouraged, even if I don't respond immediately, since I want to learn from this too.
First off the bat, let me say that whilst this is my first post I'm more into the AI side of this site than its atheist viewpoint, but I'd like to get off the starting block with a slightly interesting discussion about how we look at the Universe, after which I'll try and leave the whole sordid business alone, but I doubt it. :P
A minor point I want to make before we start: the Earth is a pretty big planet. Ok? There's enough room for everyone to have their own viewpoint without everyone getting all irate. Some guy, a long time ago, once taught to the effect of "Don't be a jerk". Who exactly you ascribe him to be: whether Son of God, the first-century equivalent of "ChuckNorrisFacts.com", or just a fairy tale: treating others as you'd expect in return is a pretty good lesson to live by. 'nuff said.
Ok: the argument. The point of this post: both parties are arguing opposing point on the same evidence - namely the existence of the Universe. So let's simplify things from the whole of creation to a little virtual world. It might exist one day, for now it's a thought experiment.
So, the little world we've created for ourselves is, if you please, a little like Albia from the early Creatures games. It has plants, animals, a simple animated backdrop of stars, and an intelligent species. Everything has genetics (of some description), so evolution is in effect if you wait long enough. What will our species think of this (simple) universe, and are they right? Bear in mind that whether or not the mini-verse has a God is a moot point when discussing ours, but I'd like to expand everyone's mind a little.
So, we've started our world, and let it run for a while. Our little intelligent beings look around and think to themselves on one specific issue (other issues may come into play, but I'm going to put them to one side for the moment. Healthy discussion of what those issues are and their implications is encouraged): whether the universe is a product of a creator (of some description), or natural processes.
As far as my brain can discern, there are 3 main views that they can take at this point (you may be a little more open-minded, and think of others. Let me know what they are :P):
1) There is a creator
2) There isn't a creator (note that this doesn't preclude a "god": just a being that created the universe)
3) There might be a creator, or there might not be
So, our little intelligent beings go off and do some studying. After a while, they come back, and report their discovery:
1) The creationists point at the animals, the ground, each other and proclaim "We exist, thus someone must have made us". This is immediately derided as a flawed argument, and the creationists spend the rest of the debate making snipes at the non-creationists' argument.
2) The non-creationists point to the animals: "We have discovered a complex series of reactions occurring inside every animal, making them change and adapt to their surroundings. Given enough time, they could have gotten to this point from very basic organisms. They do not need a creator." They then point to the sky: "We have determined that there is a mechanism and complex pattern to the stars in the sky. They show divergence from a single point, thus the universe must have been a time where the universe was in one point, and the maths shows that wibbly stuff happens at this point. No creator was needed to create the universe."
The non-creationists then back-up their point with lots of scientific observation and mathematics.
3) Those that don't know think "Hmm, the non-creationists have a stronger argument. Clearly they are more likely to be correct", and most go off into the sunset laughing at how thick the creationist must be. Others um and ah about it, and come to the viewpoint below.
If the universe was made complex enough so as to give these little critters a reason to be intelligent, then it's fair to assume that the evidence exists for the non-creationists to find. Secondly, any system included by a creator would have some sort of consistent behaviour, and the intelligent beings (being intelligent) would create a theory to match what was observed.
Yet the world in my example did have a creator. You definitely can't prove it, because the creator chose to not include a signature anywhere. The world was designed to be self-consistent, and as such the intelligent beings don't need to include a creator in their model of the universe. This is a sensible, and rational thing to do. In my example, it is also incorrect.
Note that my point here has many, many holes. Why would you create a backdrop of stars that indicate divergence from a single point, for example? I don't know: perhaps the developer was a subscriber to Big-Bang theory, and put it in for the creatures to discover. The point is that you're giving these creatures a chance to be intelligent, and it seems a little callous to put a great big sign saying "I was here - God". Of course, the counter-point is that if the stars were stationary, then the beings would have tried (and perhaps succeeded) at coming up with an equally reasonable explanation, so it's not all moot.
Also note that this doesn't necessarily extend to our universe, but it does raise the point that if we were created (not saying we were, not saying we weren't), then our creator might have decided to give us a chance to be intelligent. This means giving us a world which we can explore and exploit. Science discovers some mechanism behind something, and we use that to make our lives easier. Would we have had umpteen-thousand years of civilisation and progress if we knew for certain that if we just yelled loud enough that God'd give it to us? Speaking as a generally lazy person, I suspect not: a few people might have pitched in now and then, but for the most part you'd get a "God did it- who cares?" attitude to scientific inquiry. This is, incidentally, the prevalent view over much of human history, but the fact is that the laws of the world were there waiting to be discovered - someone just had to turn around and say "I don't care if God did it or not - he's not here now, I'm just going to have a little look".
If one takes Christianity's then we find this attitude is in itself part of our creation (see also: Garden of Eden, Apple): curiosity. Even if you denounce the Bible as just a book, the tale of the Garden of Eden is a good opener for describing the human race: we like to poke our noses in places, we like to find out not only what something is, but why it is that way.
In short, we exist. Either we are the children of some very powerful being living in a gigantic playpen that they created for us, or we are the product of an evolutionary ratchet that has resulted in a being that has the ability to make the environment adapt to us, rather than the other way around (i.e. we can't match our environment much better if we create the environment to match us). We are a remarkable species, yet short of finding a proof or disproof for a creator, we really can't say where we're from.
Discuss, flame, praise, criticise. Thank's for reading :P
debate is about authority
Hi Chris, you may be interested in Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument if you haven't already encountered it.
Some thoughts on your post. It is thought provoking to think of our own world as a simulation set in motion by some advanced beings with computational power sufficient to model something the size of our universe. And you're right that we can draw some conclusions based on that premise.
However your conclusion, that we can't really say where we're from, is really more of a starting point. Rationally, one must concede that nothing can be proved about the origin of the universe.
Anyone (including rationalists) can choose to believe any number of "creation stories", and none of them have a shred of evidence to support them. The world may have been created (as in a simulation). It may have spontaneously exploded from nothing. It may be temporally infinite, meaning that the idea that there was ever nothing is false. It may be nothing more than a virtual mathematical dream, which gives our existence a timelessness that transcends the idea of "origin". The mystery of why we're here transcends the tools of rationality and reason because we can only reason about what's inside the universe, and the origin of the universe goes beyond that.
My main response to you is that the existence of the universe isn't the central idea being debated between creationists and rationalists. What is at stake is the idea that someone has the right to wield moral or political authority based on an irrational premise, or without having to justify it on a rational basis. For instance, rationalists argue that the killing of an abortion doctor is totally unjustifiable, while a creationist sees it as a righteous act of war. Luckily the rule of law is enforced in the US, but in other countries, such vile acts are not only tolerated, they are encouraged and in the end it is not justifiable on any reasonable basis.
And I appreciate your appeal for cooler heads, but the Golden Rule (treat others as you'd like to be treated) only applies among people who consider each other equals. Religious fundamentalism (and indeed any form of fanaticism) breeds the dangerous point of view that non-believers are less than human, which justifies the atrocities wrought in the service of God (or other ideological driver). There is not enough room on the planet, according to this viewpoint. The stakes are high on both sides.
Thanks for writing!
Terren
There either is or isn't a god - problem solved :P
Thanks for the reply and the link to the article - both were a good read.
Cooler heads are needed all round but, like you say, is unlikely to come about. Such is human nature. I forget who said it, but there is a quote along the lines of "If everyone woke up one morning, and found that everyone else was of the same race, sex, religion and nation, we'd have found a reason to go to war with each other by lunchtime".
I agree that my original post did not cover certain important issues, and perhaps I will have to re-visit this little world again once I've fleshed it out a little.
A secondary point I'd like raise is the nature of thought - if you believe yourself to be conscious, are you? If so, then characters in a book are conscious, since very rarely do they consider themselves as constructs of an author. If one follows this argument to its logical conclusion, then we find that it is very easy to create worlds populated with people that nonetheless have a rich and diverse history. Simulations are also another category, as would dreams and thought experiments. If I imagine a person who believes themselves to be conscious, is he? If I made him evaluate himself, he'd certainly come to that conclusion, so how would he know?
We can infer nothing from the fact that we and the universe exist. If one chooses to look at the universe from the idea that "there is no outside", one arises at the conclusion that it is more likely that there is no creator; if one looks at the universe from the idea of "outside", then universes will be a dime a dozen, each having been called into existence almost by accident.
If one would like to read a webcomic founded on the premise of "is something that believes itself to be conscious a conscious entity", please read 1/0. It gets to more intelligent reasoning past about comic #98 (before then it's mostly just jokes about making a comic), and goes on to explore the characters, the world they live in and their relationship with the author. Navigation will break in Google Chrome, so use either FF or IE.
Voting Present
Well, that's option D.
Conscious Characters
To Chris:
You said: "if you believe yourself to be conscious, are you? If so, then characters in a book are conscious, since very rarely do they consider themselves as constructs of an author."
I think you are missing something here.
When you read about characters in a book, it is the *author* who has done the thinking for them—and later the *reader*, who enhances the characters with his own imagination. The characters themselves have no life, no consciousness.
If I scratch the words "I am conscious" in the dirt with a stick, the dirt itself does not believe it is conscious. It is I—or a reader of the words—who sees what is written and gives it meaning.
Re: Conscious Characters
I think I did miss something, but not what you think I did. :P
When a character is written in a book, the author imagines the person. The author essentially emulates another mind that exists inside the novel's universe, and looks at what that mind would do. Or makes it do something. Either way, from this "pseudomind"s point of view, it is conscious. It can reason "I think therefore I am" if the thought occurs to it (or to the author or the reader). Any and all evidence it finds points to it living in a "real" reality. Admittedly, from our viewpoint it is not alive in any way, but from its viewpoint, it is. Of course, this raises if it has a viewpoint in the first place, but if you imagine that it has one, it probably does.
This is the wetware version of artificial life: if a computer simulation can be said to be either intelligent, conscious or alive, why not a similar construct inside your own head?
Yes, writing "I am conscious" in the dirt doesn't make the dirt conscious, but if a person reading the words imagines a conscious dirt, then the dirt in their mind could, depending on your definition and viewpoint, be conscious: certainly not in the same sense that a human is conscious, but more of an emulated consciousness.
In short: if you accept that only meatspace beings can be alive and conscious, then there is probably no almighty creator. If you accept that there are alternatives to meatspace consciousness, including cyberspace and "mindspace", then the odds that this universe is a constructed one are much higher - if every person on Earth can create a universe at will, then it seems a little strange to assume that our universe would be any different. This relates a little to the article provided by terren earlier, except instead of sufficiently advanced technology your "other beings" have to just be able to read.
projected consciousness
I think there are two questions at play here when we talk about whether characters we imagine in our minds are conscious, and they are both very hard.
The easier question (cough) is, what is required of some entity for it to be conscious? Obviously there are no shortage of ideas about how to answer this, and I'm not going add another one here. But you do have to justify why an imagined character might be conscious. I think it's harder to justify that the imagined character has its own consciousness than to justify the opposite. But it's an interesting possibility one way or the other - that within our minds, we can create recursive consciousnesses that are in some way separable from our own.
The harder question is, is the projection of a consciousness also conscious? Let me explain this a bit. Let's assume for the moment that computationalism is true: that consciousness can be modeled by a computer. For instance, let's say we model all the neurons in your brain to a sufficient degree that when we run the model, we cannot distinguish it from your brain. Computationalism holds that the model we built is also conscious. Now, let's run the model for ten seconds and save the results to disk. If we then play-back the model, is the playback conscious as well? The only difference between the first run and the playback is that we're doing all the computations the first time, but the playback merely reads the result from disk.
If we say that no, the projected run is not conscious, then we have to identify why the first run is conscious and the second isn't (or we have to deny that the model was ever conscious in the first place). Functionally, the runs are identical. The difference is in the substrate - one is computed, and one is simply read from disk. Asserting that the act of computation is what makes the first run conscious leads to absurd scenarios where you can make mixtures of computation and playback.
Admitting that the projection is conscious seems absurd, or at least transforms the concept of consciousness into something highly counter-intuitive. Some take the results of this thought experiment as reductio-ad-absurdum evidence that computationalism is false, that consciousness cannot be computed.
The brilliant Bruno Marchal has a truly wild thought experiment that really takes this as far as it can go... see here, and read "4. The paradox of the two-dimensional filmed computer" - it's definitely worth your time.
Terren
I think I think, therefore I think I am
> But you do have to justify why an imagined character might be conscious. I think it's harder to justify that the imagined character has its own consciousness than to justify the opposite.
Ok, I'll attempt to justify. I make no promises, because this is where your personal beliefs come into play (and I'm not even sure what I believe), but here goes.
First, can a simulation (as in, a virtual representation of something) be intelligent?
Second, can a simulation be conscious?
If you accept both of these premises, then tell me how a simulation in your mind is any different?
And note that when I refer to computer simulations, I don't mean perfect facsimiles of this universe: I mean a universe similar to the one outlined in my original post - it is simple and "imperfect", yet complex enough to allow for an intelligence to be intelligent. The question does follow whether beings as defined in that post can be conscious, which demands a definition to "consciousness". If you can have digital entities that aren't perfect simulations of our universe being conscious, then you can have a mental entity that is not a perfect simulation also being conscious.
There will be differences in processing (algorithmic neurons vs just borrowing some actual neurons), and this also raises the question of whether this matters. Are human minds Turing Complete, for instance? If not, then they can't do everything that a Turing Complete machine can, which might include simulating a conscious entity.
I consider my point justified: either you accept certain premises and arise at a similar conclusion, or you refute those premises and arrive somewhere completely different.
what makes a simulation conscious?
> I consider my point justified: either you accept certain premises and arise at a similar conclusion, or you refute those premises and arrive somewhere completely different.
Not quite... even if one accepts that a simulated being can be conscious in principle (which I do), you still have to:
1. distinguish between the kinds of simulations that can be conscious and those that can't
2. show that imagined characters are of the type of simulation that can be conscious.
Since the first step requires figuring out consciousness, it's probably easier to skip directly to 2) and talk about the kind of simulation that imagined characters represent, making inferences about that kind of simulation to show that consciousness might be possible for that type. Obviously because step 1 hasn't been solved yet, even a great effort at doing #2 will be arguable. Nonetheless, I look forward to your attempt.
The reason I think it's easier to justify that imagined characters are not conscious is that I don't believe that they represent the kind of simulation that can be conscious.
Terren
Re: what makes a simulation conscious?
> The reason I think it's easier to justify that imagined characters are not conscious is that I don't believe that they represent the kind of simulation that can be conscious.
The issue I think is that the entity is not distinct from you. It is still your consciousness. You impose limits on it, much like a suspense of disbelief, but it is still you doing the thinking at the end of the day.
This relates nicely to this post, as at what point do you say that a sub-portion of your self can be called a self in its own right? And I think that I'm forced to say "Much more than what you use when you imagine".
Nonetheless, whilst the entity is far from a full human consciousness, I'd like to wager that by having a part of your mind willingly ignore everything else for the purpose of "running a simulation", no matter how small a part you are using, then that part can be considered distinct until it re-integrates. It is not "conscious" in the same sense that we are, but depending on whether you consider consciousness to be a continuous scale with no limits or not, then it is possibly conscious at a very rudimentary level.
Of course, you can argue that past a certain point then things stop being conscious. Perhaps imagination lies in that category.
What I'm saying is, I think, unprecidented on the internet: I thing that you're right, and I'm wrong on this.
Now if you'll excuse me, a flock of pigs has just landed in the front lawn, and is making a mess of the flowerbeds :P
Re: what makes a simulation conscious?
lol, excellent. Always good to see someone with a sense of humor on a forum like this!
I think in the same ballpark as what you're discussing is people with multiple personalities, although I hesitate to bring that up since that particular diagnosis has been so thoroughly glorified and distorted by popular media. Another thought provoking example is a character in a sci-fi book I just read in which at least four distinct sentient beings inhabit a single brain/body. Only one has "control" at a time, and they all work together.
Of course neither example is recursive in the sense of a consciousness imagined within a consciousness... my point is simply that there's a lot of play in the term consciousness, so intuitive, introspection-based notions of consciousness can be very limiting in terms of what's possible.
So thanks for the discussion because it definitely expanded my mind!
Can consciousness be given?
If we're all basically bio-mechanical machines created by our parents with a blue print written in their genes, when do we become conscious? Is there a point in our development where we achieve consciousness? If a human being created an artificial intelligence using a blue print conceived by science, would that intelligence be "switched on" with a consciousness or would it have to realize its consciousness by itself?
There is an article in the robotics section of this site that talks about a robot that is learning its surroundings similar to a 2 year old child. Maybe future constructions will actually achieve conscious thought. Maybe in the future artificial intelligence could be created fully aware and fully independent at the flick of a switch.
Conscious-
Aware of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.