[extropy-chat] Re: Structure of AI

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Adrian Tymes <wingcat at pacbell.net> wrote:> 
> For example: are we in a highly detailed computer
> simulation, or is this reality just what it appears
> to be?  Answer: if the simulation is detailed enough
> that we can never tell the difference, then it does
> not matter - any and every action we do has the same
> effect, and the universe we perceive behaves in
> exactly the same way.  (Note that this specifically
> excludes, for example, Agent Smith like characters: if
> they were present, we could eventually detect them,
> and thus we would have a way to find out that we were
> in a sim.)  It could be that way, but we can show that
> trying to determine that is futile - so we move on to
> questions where our efforts are not wasted.

Agent Smith characters would not be detectable in a simulation, because
you would have software running that would check memories and other
data against a set of rules described as 'physics' and edit the data
after the fact to make things conform.

This leads to interesting questions about revisionism. If you observe a
fortean event witnessed by a number of others, tape it on your video
camera immediately, and have it broadcast to millions via tv, you've
written the data of that event to such a broad scale that perhaps it
exceeds the capacity of revisionist software to catch up to the ongoing
memory propagation rate without some major disturbance in the
simulation.

If we are in a simulation, this could explain the disappearance of
mystical phenomena over the ages as communications media/technology
developed: the revisionist software, instead of editing memory, has
gone to the root of the problem and removed or retired all/almost all
Agent Smiths and other programs capable of violating 'physics' and
disturbing the stability of reality.

> (By analogy to your browser example, this would be
> like not caring what the content of a document is, if
> the document is unavailable.  A 404 error is a 404
> error, no matter what you were supposed to get -
> although there is special code in browsers to handle
> what happens if there is an error when reading an
> image that is to be displayed within a HTML document.)

Depends. I recall the bugginess of Corel Ventura 6 when I was writing
software manuals with it. Particularly, I discovered that one sequence
of ten characters, if spell checked, could cause your whole system to
crash. I drove the Corel engineers batty when I discovered that. They
had not considered that a person might write code in their publications
and did not protect their software against code embedded in text
altering the syntax/operations of the code in the software.

Similarly, using certain characters in your table of contents would
cause the document to be incapable of postscripting to PDF without
serious errors.

These two examples demonstrate that, at least for that application, it
was possible for a user to 'cast spells' within the simulation
environment that seriously effected that environment framework itself.
Eli's suggestion of testing reality for similar bugs has merit, but is
likely to lead him down Mr. Crowleys rabbit hole.


=====
Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
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