Are we, or might we become, artificial intelligences “living” in a virtual or artificial reality (a ‘simulation’)?
“There’s a new creation story going around. In the beginning, someone booted up a computer. Everything we see around us reflects states of that computer. We are artificial intelligences living in an artificial reality — a ‘simulation.’ It’s a fun idea, and one worth taking seriously, as people increasingly do. But we should very much hope that we’re not living in a simulation.”—Eric Schwitzgebel in an op-ed in the LA Times. (Schwitzgebel is a well-known philosopher at UC Riverside who has a blog titled The Splintered Mind, where this article is also found, with links and additional material.)
I don’t think “simulation” is a “fun idea” (outside of science fiction) if only because or especially in the light of the fact that far too many people today are liable to believe virtually any story or idea or scenario, no matter how implausible, divorced from reality, suffused with phantasy, what have you, that gains some traction on social and mass media (one can cite quite a number of examples on this score, much of it owing to QAnon (see here and here), but most recently, consider ‘birds aren’t real’). The notion that we are living in a “simulation” is nonsense if not phantasy or, less harshly perhaps, science fiction. To take it “seriously” accords it worthy of consideration in terms of possibility or probability, which is, I think, dangerous because not true (I cannot prove it to the satisfaction of some philosophers, any more than I can prove that there is, or is not, a God).
Not long ago there was a popular science article with the headline, “New Physics Experiment Indicates There’s No Objective Reality.” The notion of simulation or artificial reality is in the same ballpark, a least in spirit, although I doubt any philosophers of science have drawn the same conclusions that a few physicists and science journalists apparently did from the experiment discussed in the article. In our case, however, philosophers are entertaining hypotheses that legitimate the dreams and fantasies (and perhaps ‘phantasies’ in the pathological sense) of more than a few computer scientists. Perhaps we should extend “reality testing” beyond psychotherapeutic and psychiatric settings to the speculative musings of some scientists and philosophers:
“Reality testing is a concept initially devised by Sigmund Freud which is used by some therapists to assist clients in distinguishing their internal thoughts, feelings and ideas from the events, which are based within reality. In other words, it is the ability to see a situation for what it really is, rather than what one hopes or fears it might be. However the need for reality testing extends beyond a therapeutic setting and the need to appropriately distinguish our inner world from reality is something, which occurs in everyday life.”
However, something more like or closer to the notion of an ”artificial reality” might be said to exist or have some semblance of sense or coherence when we look, for example, at Advaita Vedānta philosophy, with its philosophical and religious ideas of fundamental ignorance (avidyā) and entanglement in māyā (illusion). However, our everyday reality must nonetheless be treated as “real” until such time on has attained the “higher truth”—the aim of jñāna-yoga—which is awareness/knowledge of (nirguna) Brahman. This appears to be a monistic philosophy, yet its monism is decidedly different from modern idealist and realist conceptions (wherein there is one kind of ‘something’ or stuff), for Brahman is (the ‘One without a second’), in the end (and beginning, as it were), beyond predication, beyond conceptualization (hence it is non-rational or supra-rational but not necessarily irrational). And while Advaita philosophers will, so to speak, talk about what Brahman is or is not (here we find rhetorical warrant by way of its role in spiritual motivation and the philosophical and religious milieu in which this tradition was engaged in arguments with other Indic philosophical schools, including other Vedantin ‘schools’), it is nonetheless dogmatically stated to be absolutely indescribable or “ineffable” (cf. the Daodejing, which says the Dao that can be talked about is not the true, or real, or everlasting Dao). This religious philosophy is perhaps best characterized as a “neutral” monism, or better, after Ram-Prasad, metaphysical non-realism, thus an Indic exemplification of apophatic mysticism. I won’t go into the complex details here, but an Advaitan would not, however, refer to the everyday reality we experience in daily life “artificial” or a “simulation,” as it remains real for us, at least until such time as one has the awareness of (nirguna) Brahman, which is not something experienced after death but in this very life. So for all intents and purposes, everyday reality is quite real for most of us, at least epistemically and practically speaking, for it is only illusory from the vantage point of those who’ve had Brahman realization, not unlike the Platonic philosopher who has had a vision of the Good and is compelled to return to the Cave which its denizens view as definitively real.
Another similar philosophical and religious notion is found in some traditions of Buddhism. In the Mahāyāna Buddhist schools, for example, “dependent origination” [(P.) paticca-samuppāda/(S.) pratītya-samutpāda] is characterized by “emptiness” (śūnyatā) meaning the lack of “inherent” existence or essential being (among other things). This emptiness is not “nothingness” but the real mode of being of things, as cause and effect, identity and difference, entity and non-entity function within a cohesive system or complex, interconnected world of dependent origination. As Thupten Jinpa says, dependent origination and emptiness might be thought of as two sides of the same coin. We might ask ourselves at this point how all of this relates to the possibility of nibbāna/nirvāna, defined as the subject’s experience of a liberated or unconditioned mind, the phenomenal character of which is characterized in terms of immeasurable peace and true happiness, “completely untainted by the presence or possibility of mental duhkhā/dukkhā.” A Zen Buddhist will proclaim that form is empty, that all phenomena in the world are illusory. On the other hand, over the centuries a prodigious amount of artwork has been created in association with Zen thought and practice, which one might characterize as, in part, or for metaphysical reasons, illusory, but its illusory nature is availing, serving the purposes of Zen spiritual training. Once more, the ethical and spiritual reasons for and consequences of these ideas is rather complicated, but in both Advaita Vedānta and some schools of Buddhism, the illusory nature of our experiences does not mean we are living in a computer-generated “artificial reality,” or a “simulation,” even if, reality has a “provisional” status when viewed in metaphysical terms within the liberated state of awareness designated as awareness of (nirguna) Brahman or nibbāna.
If you think the aforementioned comparisons from physics and Indian philosophy are a tad overdrawn or unnecessary by way of clarifying boundaries and concepts, practices and purposes, or viable hypotheses from fantasies and (more troubling) phantasies, consider the title of a recently published book: The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are In a Video Game (Bayview Books, 2019).
Given the widespread dispositional tendency to self-deception, denial, wishful thinking (of a deleterious sort) and the corresponding subscription to illusions, myths, delusions, and phantasies that suggest evidence of mass psychoses or forms of shared mental illness (what Fromm memorably termed the ‘pathology of normalcy’), it strikes me as irresponsible for philosophers like Chalmers to accord plausibility to what is charitably or misleadingly termed an “hypothesis” or thought experiment:
“Although the standard argument for the simulation hypothesis traces back to a 2003 article from Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the sim. In January, David Chalmers, one of the world’s most famous philosophers, published a defense of the simulation hypothesis in his widely discussed new book, Reality+[: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022)] Essays in mainstream publications have declared that we could be living in virtual reality, and that tech efforts like Facebook’s quest to build out the metaverse will help prove that immersive simulated life is not just possible but likely — maybe even desirable.”
Ours is a generation quite familiar with and perhaps inordinately fond of such popular scientific fictions films as 2001: A Space Odyssey (in which ‘HAL is an artificial intelligence, a sentient, synthetic, life form’) and The Matrix (which ‘depicts a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside a simulated reality, the Matrix, which intelligent machines have created to distract humans while using their bodies as an energy source’). In the latter, “a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical work Simulacra and Simulation [in French, 1981] … is visible on-screen as ‘the book used to conceal disks,’” although Baudrillard “said that The Matrix misunderstands and distorts his work.” So perhaps it should not surprise us that our scientists and philosophers are transforming if not transfiguring science fiction and fantasy into simulation hypotheses that include the possibility of “virtual reality” one day effacing the substantive metaphysical and ontological boundaries and differences with reality as we know (and have known it). This reminds one of how utopian imagination thought and imagination has often been misunderstood and misused as pointing to imminent historical possibilities or pictures of the future. That accounts in part for the “Liberal anti-utopianism” of such philosophical luminaries as Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, and Isaiah Berlin who came to “dismiss utopians or their sympathizers as foolhardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians at worst.” Hence we often find the term “utopian” used in a pejorative sense, despite the fact that this represents a tragic yet remediable misunderstanding of the moral, social, and political function of utopian thought and imagination.
Returning to Schwitzgebel:
“Scientists and philosophers have long argued that consciousness should eventually be possible in computer systems. With the right programming, computers could be functionally capable of independent thought and experience. They just have to process enough information in the right way, or have the right kind of self-representational systems that make them experience the world as something happening to them as individuals. In that case, the argument goes, advanced engineers should someday be able to create artificially intelligent, conscious entities: ‘sims’ living entirely in simulated environments. These engineers might create vastly many sims, for entertainment or science. And the universe might have far more of these sims than it does biologically embodied, or ‘real,’ people. If so, then we ourselves might well be among the sims.
In that case, the argument goes, advanced engineers should someday be able to create artificially intelligent, conscious entities: ‘sims’ living entirely in simulated environments. These engineers might create vastly many sims, for entertainment or science. And the universe might have far more of these sims than it does biologically embodied, or ‘real,’ people. If so, then we ourselves might well be among the sims.”
Poppycock! At least in reaction to the last sentence in each of these two paragraphs. This is literary phantasy or science fiction. I find the arguments here implausible for motley reasons, some of which are canvassed in my post on Turing’s AI philosophy (which was not static and not always pellucid, conceptually speaking). I well realize that some science fiction (much like some, or at least aspects of some utopias) has, over time, become reality, but to speak of “computers [that] could be functionally capable of independent thought and experience” is metaphysical, ontological, and psychological nonsense. It reveals a failure to understand just what thought and experience among human animals entails, what they mean, both conceptually and practically. It represents, in my view, a colossal failure to think long and hard about human nature, what makes for a human animal (here is where I find many of the books by Raymond Tallis to be indispensable). And it shows how much of what counts as “philosophy of mind” in contemporary philosophy, when not wholly reductionist (or ‘eliminativist’) is, consciously or not, a mere underlaborer for sullied sciences and technology enchanted by the Promethean promises of science fiction and phantasy.
If I understand him correctly, Schwitzgebel leaves open the possibility there may one day be “sophisticated simulations containing genuinely conscious artificial intelligences.” I believe that scenario to be impossible. A more sensible Schwitzgebel concludes his LA Times article (it is reprinted at his blog but with a postscript): “A large, stable planetary rock is a much more secure foundation for reality than bits of a computer program that can be deleted at a whim.”
Relevant Bibliographies
- Analogy and Metaphor
- The Emotions
- Ethical Perspectives on the Sciences and Technology
- Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity
- Sullied (Natural and Social) Sciences
- Utopian Thought, Imagination, and Praxis
Relevant Notes
- On the distinction and differences between AI (‘artificial intelligence’) and human intelligence, judgment and the emotions
- Notes on Science and the Sciences
- Toward assessing some of the arguments of “AI’s first philosopher,” Alan Turing
- The “kindly illusions” of Yoga and utopian thought and imagination
This is also available for viewing or download on my Academia page as The Simulation Argument and Hypothesis in Philosophy.
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