Are We Real? (Pt. II)

Yesterday we looked at an article by computer expert Peter Kassan in which he critiques the notion that we're actually virtual beings in a grand cosmic simulation. Kassan is very skeptical that such a simulation could ever be accomplished, and I'd like to finish the discussion of his argument today.

One of his objections is that a material device like a computer cannot produce immaterial effects like consciousness. He has more to say on this in the part of his article we'll look at here. How, for instance, can a computer generate what philosophers call intentionality? He writes:

The argument that a sufficiently complex computer program would be conscious in the same way you and I are goes something like this:

• The brain is an information processor.
• A computer is an information processor.
• A computer can be programmed to process the same sort of information the brain processes in the same way that the brain processes information.
• The conscious mind arises from information processing in the brain.
• Therefore, a conscious mind will arise from equivalent information processing on a computer.

The argument depends crucially on the concept of information. A computer contains, processes, and displays data like a highway road sign consisting of a rectangular array of light bulbs. As we drive by, we can interpret the pattern of light as letters and words, but the message we read is actually nowhere contained in the display.

Imagine a space alien interpreting the display as a binary code, with each column of eight light bulbs conveying one byte. How would they interpret a sign that to us read DANGER—CONSTRUCTION AHEAD? A computer is processing data (information) only because we interpret it as doing so; a brain behaves as it does without interpretation.

In other words, the arrangement of the bulbs in the sign has a meaning to us, it is about something, but how do the reactions in our brains when we see the sign generate that meaning? The brain is just an enormously complex system of neurons. Where does the meaning come from? There's no meaning in the chemical reactions that fill the brain when we observe the sign. Nor does a computer generate meaning. It simply produces data. Meaning is the product of conscious observers.

Kassan finishes with a couple more thoughts about all this:

There’s another irony concerning the notion that we’re all just computer simulations. If you believe you’re living in a computer simulation, then everything you think you know about the world — including its vastness, the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and even the very existence of computers — is part of that simulation, and so is completely worthless. The evidence on which the entire chain of reasoning depends, in short, is illusory — and so nothing at all can be argued from it.

This is an interesting point. On the simulation hypothesis none of our beliefs are reliable since they're all just beliefs we hold because we've been programmed to do so. Among those simulated beliefs are our moral beliefs:

If we believe we’re just simulations, how should we behave? Should we treat everyone around us as if they’re just a figment of someone else’s imagination, shamelessly manipulating them for our own pleasure or gain? Should we take careless risks, knowing we’ll live again in another simulation or after a reboot? Should we even bother to get out of bed, knowing that it is all unreal? I think not.

If the universe is a simulation then we're all programmed to live the way we do. No behavior is wrong in any meaningful sense. There's no free will, no morality, no meaning to our existence, no justice or injustice.

We're all just actors on a stage manipulated by an intelligent programmer for his own purposes. Thus, there is nor can there be, any value to our lives.

This, by the way, would be true as well if the programmer were a God who preordains every aspect of our lives.

Belief in a real world and other minds besides our own is properly basic. We are within our epistemic rights to believe that the world exists objectively unless and until we are confronted with a compelling defeater for that belief, but the simulation hypothesis falls short of being a compelling defeater.