Consciousness slash reality: Anil Seth and Donald Hoffman

I seem to remember Facebook(?) having a thing where dead people could carry sending Happy Birthday messages after death using some semblance of character picked up from posts made while alive. For example a mom might want to do this. With only current technology it would be possible for her to ring up with the right voice and even send videos of herself with the right body and face having virtual adventures in her virtual world. Assuming she (and her peers) could make money by (for example) product recommendations she could perhaps send presents to the next generation. A sort of Momma Christmas except it might be quite difficult to convince children she doesn't exist. She would just be a computer program running on a powerful computer - what are we?

(Dec 12, 2021 12:17 AM)confused2 Wrote: I seem to remember Facebook(?) having a thing where dead people could carry sending Happy Birthday messages after death using some semblance of character picked up from posts made while alive. For example a mom might want to do this. With only current technology it would be possible for her to ring up with the right voice and even send videos of herself with the right body and face having virtual adventures in her virtual world. Assuming she (and her peers) could make money by (for example) product recommendations she could perhaps send presents to the next generation. A sort of Momma Christmas except it might be quite difficult to convince children she doesn't exist. She would just be a computer program running on a powerful computer - what are we?

Bingo, C2. Just what I was thinking of when I stated:

"Though I'll grant some crude resemblance of psychological replication might be possible. It will just never capture all the specific details that constituted a person's identity at a specific date."

I won't even rule out some information being extracted from the brain by an implant over the course of time. But no approach is going to perfectly recreate all the memories and the psychological structure of the individual. And certainly not the endocrine secretions in the blood and neural chemistry and electrochemical quirks of the original body that influenced the dynamic interplay of what was stored in the brain, when activated/deployed in response to _X_.

However, considering that even close friends and family are restricted to the outer, routine behavior of the applicable person -- when it comes to knowing them... Then a crude resemblance could perhaps suffice. What was actually transpiring privately in the mind of the original doesn't have to be duplicated in exquisite detail, since the concerned parties never had access to that introspective territory and hidden realm of interests and motivations, anyway.

A finely detailed autobiography that supposedly dispenses inner secrets of the author's mind is compromised by the person's own filtered interpretation of themselves. That could range from idealizations to narcissistic hyperbole to the opposite of unwarranted self-disparagement.

One might imagine the controllers of an information network like (say) facebook agreeing (for a percentage) to host virtual entities 'in perpetuity'.

What would surprise me is if we created an identical environment, as well. Let’s say that Eva 1 and Eva 2, once replicated, walked straight into different but identical restaurants. Would they choose the same thing? If not, that would probably be enough to convince me that FW exists. If they both chose the same thing, it would be fascinating to know how much alteration was needed in the environment to change the outcome, eg., in his discussion regarding change blindness.

This might be something that we could test with AIs.

Oh, BTW, did you know that CC was the first cloned cat? "But the cats looked different because coat patterns and other features can be determined in the womb."

The thing about the anil seth argument is that he thinks the qm world does not exist and this is all there is.

(Dec 16, 2021 05:32 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: The thing about the anil seth argument is that he thinks the qm world does not exist and this is all there is.

How do you know about his belief regarding QM?

(Dec 16, 2021 06:32 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:

(Dec 16, 2021 05:32 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: The thing about the anil seth argument is that he thinks the qm world does not exist and this is all there is.

How do you know about his belief regarding QM?

He seems to be basing his argument on classical physics and an external world that appears as a physically disjoint set from the subjective world. But in certain objective instances the mind can influence the so-called external world that appears separate. For a thorough explanation of this and how this occurs read the reality self-simulation principle by chritopher langan.