What is Human Consciousness? (THIS IS NOT KEANU REEVES)

The above image is not Keanu Reeves. With this statement I don't mean that the photo above is actually the late 19th century actor, Paul Mounet. (Or IS it?!?) I mean that Keanu Reeves is a human man who lives in Los Angeles, while the image above is simply a photograph of him. 

However, you may argue that it is a photo of Keanu Reeves, so in a sense it IS Keanu Reeves, and you would also be correct.

How can the image both NOT BE Keanu Reeves, and yet BE Keanu Reeves at the same time?!? Has the camera somehow imprinted a small piece of Keanu Reeves' soul onto the photo? No, because detailed drawing of Keanu Reeves could be just as much "Keanu Reeves" as the photo above. I could even DESCRIBE his face to a talented enough police sketch artist and she could produce a drawing that would ALSO be "Keanu Reeves" despite perhaps never seeing him in her life.

The thing the human man named Keanu Reeves and the photograph/drawings share is the same likeness. A "likeness" is another way to say that the sizes of his features and their location in relation to each other produces a quite unique and complex pattern. This pattern of Keanu Reeves's face is present both the human man's Keanu Reeves face AND the photograph's Keanu Reeves face. So they are both Keanu Reeves. 

 This idea, that a generalized object, such as "an apple", or "red", or "a pipe", goes back to ancient times with Plato's Theory of Forms, where he postulates that there is a idealized version of everything in the world (called "Forms") which things in the real world are simply imperfect versions of. What he was referring to is the way we can have an idea in our heads of something like "red" but then recognize many things that are "red" but that may have slightly different tint or shades as each other but still represent the idea of "red" in our minds. 

The artist René Magritte famously made this point in his painting, The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) in 1929.

Magritte beautifully and simply illustrated the difference between a thing and it's likeness. There is no pipe anywhere in the painting. It is not made from pieces or quanta of pipe. There is absolutely nothing that is "a pipe" anywhere on the canvas. Getting closer to the painting, touching it, smelling it, will give you NO further information about the "pipe." In fact, if you look too closely there is no pipe at all. It is only when looking upon the full piece that you can see the pipe. And notice that it doesn't matter if this is the original painting, a photo of if, or some other reproduction. You could make a cope of this on wood, or etch it in glass; you could arrange single electrons to reproduce the photo or you could re-arrange all the galaxies in the universe to reproduce it - and never would you get any more or less information about "the pipe." Because the medium doesn't matter, it is the pattern.

This is the same as human consciousness. There is no "divine material" that makes up our minds, no incorporeal specter residing inside us giving vigor to our bodies. Our brains are made from atoms, molecules, and proteins. The synapses of our neurons fire across voltage differentials a thousand times a second processing inputs from our senses, thoughts in our consciousness, and reductions of incredibly complex coordinated motions of nervous impulses and muscle movements for us to understand and interact with the world around us.

It is this complex and ethereal pattern, made of physical matter AND electrochemical interactions, which makes up our conscious mind. Not only a pattern in space, but in time as the electric signals our brain constantly emanates as it manages inputs and thoughts, formulates movements and speech, and retrieves and saves memories. 

This pattern is complex, but recognizable. We don't just recognize our family, friends, and acquaintances by their faces and voices alone, but the manner of speaking, the subjects they talk about, and the way they convey their thoughts. 

If your best friend or significant other had their mind transferred to a complex virtual mind inside an interactive robot or a computer simulation and the contacted you, it would be relatively easy for them to convince you it was them. They could simply tell you a piece of information that only you and them would know, but you could also simply have a conversation with them and you would recognize it was them after a short time.

Human consciousness is a pattern made of changing electric fields, chemical reactions, and protein filaments. Consciousness is not the brain any more than Magritte's pipe is flecks of paint or Keanu Reeves face is pixels on a computer screen; but it is also not an otherworldly construct of quintessence. It is something that we can detect and record, and someday it will be something we can copy and preserve. 

There is no reason the pattern of human consciousness cannot be transferred to another medium - such as silicon or qubits and to exist in an artificial or virtual body. It probably won't happen in my lifetime - scientist have to decode the pattern and engineers need to build computers several magnitudes more complex to adequately reproduce it - but it will happen someday and we need to start preparing for how this will change human society, and affect how we think of ourselves in the universe.

Why the Simulation Argument Is False

What if I told you that, despite what you may have been led to believe, the entire world was simply a highly detailed simulation. You may say that sounds preposterous, and you would be right, but it is still helpful to look at why it's wrong. (No, it is not because we don't all have Tron suits under our skin.)

The Simulation Argument, by philosopher Nick Bostrom, is a proposition based on the near certainty of a future where computers are capable of physics simulations which would allow high-fidelity simulations It postulates that one of three things MUST be true

1. The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a stage capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations is very close to zero
2. The fraction of civilizations that are interested in running high-fidelity simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero
3. The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

I happen to agree with the premise of the argument. There most certainly will be ample refined and dense computational power in the near future where we can make artificial worlds that are almost indistinguishable from reality.While it may never been perfect enough to fool someone who has actually experienced the real world, it would almost certainly be possible to fool a human mind which has known nothing else.

If you include the entire past and future of the universe (which Bostrom does), then there is almost zero chance that the first two postulates are true. The fact that human society on Earth has almost reached this level of technology means it is almost certainly "reachable" by some civilization, and the idea that a significant fraction of civilizations who wouldn't want to run simulations in these artificial environments seems also very close to zero. 

Unfortunately the third postulate is not only fatally flawed but there are many other postulations that can replace it in this trilemma. Let's take a closer look at the third, and most discussed postulate.

The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

While the first two postulates are rather obvious, the final one hinges on several fatally flawed assumptions:

1. That there is some benefit in running these highly detailed simulations, so detailed that we each have (what appears to be at least) detailed consciousness, complex emotions, and also feel very detailed and traumatizing pain.
2. That there is some overriding benefit in the vast majority of these simulations to hide the fact that the participants (you and me) are in fact in a simulation.
3. The ethics of deceiving self-aware artificial intelligences into believing they are humans and that they are really living not only on the real planet Earth, but in the real universe, must be vastly different from what we currently think of as acceptable scientific experimentation.
   
4. That if simulation technology is possible, and allowed, that the number of simulated humans would be much HIGHER than all the human beings that have ever existed.
   

While many of us have been to a play or seen a movie where the actors have went through very emotional states, even putting themselves through physical pain in the quest for an "authentic" performance, it is a quite difficult position to defend to say that a director must actually harm her actors in order to get a meaningful performance from them. If future civilizations are running "simulations" why do they need to include such visceral pain and anguish in our "simulated" existence. If you say, "Well, it's only SIMULATED pain and anguish" I think most people would be hard-pressed to imagine how "simulated pain" would be different from real pain. Even if pain doesn't harm us physically it is still just as real. What possible information can be gained by torturing a bunch of AI in a computer?

Why would the simulation need to include a deception about the reality of the simulation? Many people live their whole lives with the belief that their is some sort of unseen "spirit world" or some other form of life after death. It would be simple enough to avoid much of the ethical conundrum to simply let everyone know that the world we are living in is a simulation and it could be escaped at any time by "death."

What benefit would be lost if one of us, or all of us, discovered we were in a simulation? Most of us would be quite terrified to discover we were not real humans and our world was just a simulation. Why not simply program the simulated humans to not worry about that? Why not remove the ability for us to even think about it? While it doesn't prove we are not in a simulation that we can both think quite rationally about it, as well as be terrified at the thought of it being real, surely indicates that the chances of us being in a simulation are far from 1/1.

It seems an ethical simulation would simply allow all the simulated humans to privately know they could exit the simulation at any time. The fact that most governments consider suicide a crime on the level of murder, and most religions in the world consider suicide to be a sin, indicate that either the creators of these simulations are monstrously immoral, or else we can be relatively assured we are not in a simulation. Either way, it certainly doesn't indicate a simulation is MORE likely given the circumstances of the human condition we are living with in this world.

Finally, probably the most objectively disqualifying argument against the Simulation Argument comes from how models and simulations usually work. Statistically speaking there is a limit to the sample size that is necessary to accurately model a population. It would be orders of magnitude smaller. 

For instance, if some civilization wanted to run a model on how humans thought in the 2020's for instance, the model they would make would be SIGNIFICANTLY smaller in population than the 7 billion people in the world. For accuracy of accuracy of as high as 99.9% they would actually only need a sample population of less than one million people. In fact, even if they simulated a population a large as the entire population of the human race throughout the 50,000 of our existence (about 110 billion humans) a sample population of one million people would suffice for the same 99.9% accuracy.

(Here is a sample size calculator from Survey Monkey if you want to look into this yourself.)

In other words, it would actually be MUCH less likely that you were a part of such a simulation. The odds would be more like 1 million/110 billion, which is 0.0009%

Even if they decided to run a trillion iterations of history, they would STILL only need to use the same 1 million artificial humans. What would be the point of making more? What would it even mean to add another? Would they just be a copy of another one or would the Simulation Gods create a unique person from scratch even if it wouldn't add significantly to the accuracy of their simulation? Would that mean it was just the same artificial human copied or is the entire million simply copies of some simulated Adam and Eve?

While there will almost certainly be a day when artificial intelligences inhabit simulated worlds, there is no reason to suspect they will be lied to and fooled into thinking they are somewhere they are not. The expense, trouble, and moral transgression are not worth the negligible increase in accuracy that would warrent using the number of simulated humans in ANY future simulation that would even come close to making the odds of us currently being in a simulation anywhere near 1/1. 

So rest easy knowing you are definitely in the real world, but cherish the time you have. No resets available!

Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

I posted the following reply to this interesting article on Ars Technica: A “no math” (but seven-part) guide to modern quantum mechanics I thought it might be fun to also publish it here.

I think a lot of quantum "weirdness" can be better understood when people take into account the relativistic effects of fast moving particles.

When something approaches the speed of light, most people are aware of the time distortion effects (from our perspective the clock of an accelerated object seems to slow down), but many forget there is also an accompanying spacial distortion as well (i.e. the length of "a meter" measured by an accelerated object is much longer than a meter if measured in our perspective).

In the case of a photon (in a vacuum) there would both be "no time" between an emission point and an absorption point, and "no space," as the time and spacial distortions become infinite at the speed of light. Particles going very close to the speed of light will have "very small time" and "very small distances" between emission and absorption.

An additional feature of relativity is that the universe must agree that both the photon's "point of view" and our point of view is a valid and true description of time and space events. From the photon's POV there is almost no space in between the the laser and the wall, yet from our POV there is space in between, but both observers must agree on what happens.

So while from our perspective it appears the photons are interfering with each other, from the photon's point of view the paths it can travel are limited to those that won't interfere with any other similar photons traveling a similar path in the universe. This ensures that the result (the pattern on the wall) makes sense from both the "fact" that there is a lot of space between emission and absorption (our POV) and the that there is almost no space between emission and absorption (the photon's POV).

The reasons that the photon's path is limited when moving through the two slits are complex and involve wave mechanics, but it may be sufficient to understand that the single photon MUST travel in a way that appears to us to involve time and space, but to the photon involves "allowed" and "not allowed" paths and probability distributions, and BOTH must agree.

(BTW, the only way we can "see" the interference pattern caused by single particles going "through both slits" is that we create an artificial image where we compare numerous particles to each other. There is no way to detect the interference pattern if we only examine a single particle.)