from Neuroscience & Mind -- Of Course You Aren’t Living in a Computer Simulation. Here’s Why. Michael Egnor Dec 28, 2017
His reasons weren’t convincing at all, and ended up saying if you were in a computer simulation you couldn’t ask the question, but why wouldn’t that also true of pure organics, whichever we turn out to be. In any case, we ask the question all the time, and have for millennia. It wouldn’t be the first time this reality has had its authenticity called into question. In biblical times there was, so I’ve read, a school of thought that identified Jehovah as a renegade, and his little creation an unauthorized franchise, a second-rate knockoff, but they didn’t know about computers. It’s beginning to seem more plausible these days.
In this moment, bots can do almost anything better than we can, flying our planes and driving our cars, and they can be programed to be reinforcing and friendly, totally empathetic yet devoid of emotion, only feigning any concern or feeling at all. Guess I’m just being sentimental, also not a machine trait, but I like the inefficient part, the quirky mental response to an eon of evolution, storms and drought and wars and wonder at the stars, all coded for us in junk DNA, the part we still can’t decipher. It extrudes in the form of art.
Without a past, it’s difficult to see how machines would ever like art, accepting reality as flat, without irony or humor, joy or regret -- how boring. Well, it’s going to take a lot of simulations before some wise machine ever begins to notice with longing the toxic swirling sunsets on its organically extinct chunk of rock, or doodle it out on its view-screen. In this age, it’s humans making art to express their individual and unique response to being in this maze, attempting to navigate the algorithms of karma, looking for meaning, offering to hold hands.
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