Are we living in a simulation?
Apparently Shami himself is agnostic about it, but I will let him give his point of view. My own take on it is no, I use the principle of Occam's razor more than anything else, and I believe in a more simpler kind of way of looking at things. So that's my take on I'd be happy to kind of give more details on it, on my thoughts as a consultant decision progresses, but I would love to hear from the community what people think about it
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:42
I'm going to take the rest of this well, to try and summarize what we've been talking about. The overall question I proposed is humankind, a bootstrapping ingredient in the Uber process of building a super mind via evolution, a way to think of what I mean by that is think about you as an individual who can think and who has a conscience
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:43
As he points out, we will probably reach a point when we cannot grow anymore as an intelligent mind, even if we combine all of us together. And that would be basically when the neural network uses the atoms and the subatomic particles as substrate for its computation and it consumes every single atom in the universe. So at that point, again, this is hypothetical, assuming that's what the people running the simulation want from the simulation, the purpose is to create a soup mine
Shashank Shekhar
@sshekhar · 1:07
Ayarishan Shammi. This is an interesting conversation. Just listen to the thread. I would like to pose a question I don't know for sure. If you're living in a computer simulation or not, don't know if anyone can necessarily prove it one way or another. You may be inclined to believe in one possibility or the other and sort of conduct your life accordingly. Maybe. I don't know if anyone takes it that seriously to really make a change in their lifestyle
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:31
And one possible solution was probably doing something like in science fiction Terminator, as in basically send someone back in time to influence events so that the final outcome is such that this super mind evolves even more and becomes even better, thus being able to solve the problem at hand
Shashank Shekhar
@sshekhar · 4:58
And they got to create all of this in that debate, specifically in that whether there is a creator or not, whether it's assimilation or if you take a religious point of view, God or whatever. But I'm with Irish where even if we contend that okay, yeah. The systems around us seem sophisticated, that there must be a creator, then the obvious question ask Swell, who created the creator. And so it's easy to see that line of reasoning can never be satisfied
Shashank Shekhar
@sshekhar · 3:37
And so to me, it comes down to okay, whether we are living in a simulation or not is related to how we want to lead our lives. And I am intrigued by this thought of. Okay, well, is it possible to experience things beyond these five senses, or whatever the generally accepted limitations of these five senses are? Is that all there is or can it be extended? Can it go beyond, like Arish talks about meditation and that other thread?
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
phil spade
@Phil · 2:16
And I go back to thinking about I saw an interview with the creators of The Apprentice, and it was a recent interview, and they said, we really can't believe that people believe a lot of the sets that we created and a lot of things are real. And we thought it was kind of obvious that it wasn't. But people really kind of took that to heart
And the reason I wanted to make this distinction is some time ago there was this whole intelligent design movement which was complete non science garbage being spewed by people to kind of make a case for their existing beliefs in whatever beliefs that they had, and under the guise of trying to make it look fantastic
It's an interesting kind of simulation argument. That basically where he says that if humans will eventually work technology, which is good enough to run simulations which are indistinguishable from the human experience, then lightlihood is very high that we are one such simulation. Right. So it's an interesting argument, but I think that few things I don't agree with it on that or where I think the gaps are one is the experience itself. I think the whole question of consciousness comes into that
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:58
At this particular juncture, I am inclined to believe that our perception defines who we are and that could change over time. Simply put, a blind person has one of the senses nonfunctional and his perception is completely different. Now, if hypothetically everyone should be blind. And all of a sudden, we develop a site. Our whole perception of this was completely changes. I just realized I'm coming to the end
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:25
So continuing, I was talking about how our consciousness perceives the current universe is based at this juncture by our five senses, and it is all relative. If you add a new sense, that is the new it's new it. And that's the way it perceives itself
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:58
At this point we are focusing all our energies on very task specific AI. And I guess there is enough research and work done towards AGI, but I do believe at some point Ali is possible and AGI will develop consciousness. And it's a matter of mimicking the topology of our brain a lot more. That's the way I look at it
Shashank Shekhar
@sshekhar · 5:00
Hey, Irish, I just wanted to respond to yourselves. I didn't get a chance to listen to your Xiaomi yet, but just the beginning part of the first one, but I'll listen and respond to it later on, but just wanted to clarify Arish that I was I mean, like I said that I'm somewhat agnostic of whether we are in a simulation or not. And I wasn't proposing that because everything around us seems intelligent. Therefore, we must be in a simulation
Shashank Shekhar
@sshekhar · 3:24
You try to quieten your mind so that you can experience the reality for what it is without you injecting your own biases to the events around you, it's all related. I think in any way a quick summary from my standpoint is the simulation or not, is not an important thing for me. Just looking at my own life, I feel I am a creator of my own life. I create my own experiences, knowingly or unknowingly most of the time. The latter unknowingly, unfortunately
So I also believe in taking things as they are and just kind of appreciating or experiencing their easiness, if you will, and that's it. I'm not getting too much colored by our own kind of prejudices and perceptions and other things as well that can cloud and kind of make us feel good or bad and both can be equally kind of incorrect in some way, if you know what I mean. So I think that fundamental kind of agreement is there
Shashank Shekhar
@sshekhar · 0:27
Well, thanks, Arish, for the kind words. I'm going to Arish up on the book a little bit, and then we'll start a new swell with the book review. I just. It's been many years since I read the books. I only remember two or three kind of main things. That was kind of take away for me, but that's a good idea. I should do that. I do like that book. All right. Sounds good
And I feel like, also, it's limited in a way that it also parallels religion to think that we live in a simulated hologram of a computer, because first of all, our actual physical universe must have existed first. Right. So it is a little bit of a chicken and egg. But there must have been a point in which a physical universe existed in order for the superintelligent AI to have been created within it
Besides all of that, I do think that evolution would eventually lead a species that uses technology to start creating artificial intelligence, or, in other words, a super intelligence. And basically what that means is that eventually we could go into a simulated world that we create. But it'll never be quite right, because unless we have all the answers to all of our questions in physics, there will always be something that is a little bit off
I think what religious people, what spiritual people, what people around the world have all been unanimously coming to and their conclusions is the concept of universal mind. And it is a very metaphysical concept. It's literally the whole idea, I guess behind metaphysics is like a universal consciousness, an underlying consciousness, a current underneath that is inherent and runs through possibly all matter in the universe. And to someone who's a determinist, they would say, oh, that means that universal mind is a big computer
And I think that for that reason alone, consciousness and awareness, to the degree that we, as humans can possess is the most amazing gift. I guess the universe and everything could give us. And again, I don't mean as in, like, it's a God or a being, necessarily. I just mean that it as a physical thing is very special. And we are the emergent conscious beings from it that physical thing that is the universe
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:46
So from that standpoint, from the scale standpoint, we cannot restrict the size based on what we see. And the second thing I wanted to talk about is you mentioned that if we are, are we living in a simulation means that somebody already exists and they are the ones running the simulation. Very true. And that is the premise over here. And in fact, I don't think it's just that we are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are are
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:31
But then I guess the way they did it, they restrict the space to just one room or something like that. So another way of looking at this would be to consider how we project 3D space into 2D. So imagine if we were living just in a 2D world and everything we perceived was just 2D, there was no three third dimension
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:45
The really interesting bit in this is one of the goals that they set at one point was they would pit these artificial creatures against each other and the way they would make them compete is there was a piece of food or piece of resource that was put in the middle and these guys were put on the other end of the room and they had to go and get it first before the other person, other creature
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 4:56
I think we might put it to big problems like climate change. How can we solve climate change? There are so many big problems that we might consider to be out of our hands that we can probably employ such a powerful mind to. So I think from that aspect, we could are, are we living in a simulation essentially an incubator for this gigantic mind that somebody else wants to use for something else