Living inside a massive computer program + Consciousness is an inference process

[C C]

Are We Living inside Massive a Computer Program?
http://bigthink.com/videos/joscha-bach-w...er-program

EXCERPT: Are we living in a video game? If so, the joke is on us, says cognitive scientist Joscha Bach. When people debate the possibility of human existence as a simulation, it's predominantly assumed that we are the players. Our overlord simulators are watching us, right? Well, that doesn't seem to gel with the amount of detail present in our world and the observable universe beyond. Why did our cosmic creators bother to code trillions of galaxies into the viewfinders of our telescopes? The Higgs boson, for example, is not necessary for our existence, so who would have the time to add such irrelevant frills just for our amusement (maybe the simulators had a really great intern that summer)?

The answer? It's not made for us. According to Bach, if this is a simulation it's unlikely that we are the main attraction and much more realistic that the simulators wanted to make a model of a universe to explore hypothetical physics. That tiny blue dot with primates mixing concrete all over the surface? "We are just a random side effect or an artifact of the fact that evolution is possible in this universe," says Bach. But, that explanation is purely hypothetical because Bach is confident that we are living in base reality. However it's not bubble bursting from Bach: while we are not living in a simulation, we are living in a computer program. How can that be? Above, he explains why, and also gives his response to the 'game console probability' hypothesis popularized by Elon Musk....

MORE: http://bigthink.com/videos/joscha-bach-w...er-program

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Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of inference
https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-...-inference

EXCERPT: [...] What’s remarkable about this sort of repetitive, self-organising behaviour is that it’s contrary to how the Universe usually behaves. Everything should actually get more random, dispersed and chaotic as time marches on. That’s the second law of thermodynamics – everything tends towards chaos, and entropy generally increases. So what’s going on?

Complex systems are self-organising because they possess attractors. These are cycles of mutually reinforcing states that allow processes to achieve a point of stability, not by losing energy until they stop, but through what’s known as dynamic equilibrium. An intuitive example is homeostasis. If you’re startled by a predator, your heartbeat and breathing will speed up, but you’ll automatically do something to restore your cardiovascular system to a calmer state (following the so-called ‘fight or flight’ response). Any time there’s a deviation from the attractor, this triggers flows of thoughts, feelings and movements that eventually take you back to your cycle of attracting, familiar states. In humans, all the excitations of our body and brain can be described as moving towards our attractors, that is, towards our most probable states.

On this view, humans are little more than ‘strange loops’, as the philosopher Douglas Hofstadter puts it. We all flow through an enormous, high-dimensional state-space of manifold possibilities, but are forced by our attractors to move around in confined circles. We are like an autumn leaf; tracing out a never-ending trajectory in the turbulent eddies of a stream, thinking our little track is the whole world. This description of ourselves as playful loops might sound teleologically barren – but it has profound implications for the nature of any complex system with a set of attracting states, such as you or me....

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-...-inference

[Magical Realist]

Well maybe this simulation isn't made JUST for us. But afterall, this life is only the first level of gameplay. Succeeding afterlives and new avatars will usher in higher planes of interplanetary then intergalactic travel incorporating interaction with beings beyond our wildest imaginations. And just wait till you make it to the dark matter level! Then the transdimensional god mode level! After that maybe we wake up as cyborgian brains in mayonaise jars. Oh well..reset and play again.

[Magical Realist]

If consciousness is just another process like evolution, why is it all lit up on the inside? Why doesn't perception and inference and computation just go on in the dark like evolution presumably does? Why is this subjectivity of awareness in fact the very essence of what we mean by consciousness?

[C C]

If consciousness is just another process like evolution, why is it all lit up on the inside? Why doesn't perception and inference and computation just go on in the dark like evolution presumably does? Why is this subjectivity of awareness in fact the very essence of what we mean by consciousness?

Even after experience emerges slash "is brutely conjured without need of elemental precursors", the neural correlates or labyrinth of electrochemical processes which it is correlated to don't acquire any new physics properties in terms of such being attributed to the microscopic structures, molecules, atoms, and particles.

A claim that experience is inherent in the overall dynamic organization of the components (like an image riding on the spatial relationships of individual pixels) is insufficient. Since electromagnetism as the mediating / connective agency between the spatially separated components likewise acquires no new properties; and again, lacks any (non-speculative) precursor characteristics and causal powers for that kind of "qualitative showing" to incrementally develop from. Though the claim of correlation can still be made, which indirectly implies some kind of dualism since the qualitative manifestations aren't accordingly detected residing within the mechanized matter itself (there's no public / outer detection of those abrupt novelties anywhere, for that matter).

Ergo, the phenomenal "showing" characteristics of awareness are simply a brute add-on to the ascending chain or hierarchy of scientific explanations (from fundamental physics to biology). They don't fall out of the collective scheme or integrated specialized accounts sported by the physical sciences. The explanation both suddenly begins and stops with correlation to a higher-order level of neural structure / processes or configurations of brain activity.

That such fails to register or provoke puzzlement among some or many physicalists is a kind of testament to the possibility of them actually being subliminal panpsychists (or in the closet panpsychists, in obscuring denial of panpsychism, etc). When one gets right down to it, panpsychism is what commonsense or naive realism boils down to. Wherein out of unthinking native reflex one is projecting the mind's[*] manifestations and intellectual understandings upon a meta-phenomenal version of the presented external world, which conflictingly -- in the usual context of a materialist worldview -- would actually lack any such properties traditionally classified as "mental".

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[*] "Mind" being a generic concept for whatever specific entity / agency has qualitative manifestations and reflective thought associated with it (brain, artificial intelligence, exotic space alien organs, etc).

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