Sorry, I think I might be misunderstanding you. By "We live in the base reality", do you mean "Even if we live in a simulation, the simulation itself is hosted somewhere; following back the chain, eventually you reach the base reality. Therefore in the same sense as one should say that Microsoft Word runs/exists in our real world, one should say that (even if we're simulated) we exist in the base reality"?

Correct.

You imply twice in your post that you assume there is a base reality, but why?

I could argue it makes just as much sense that every layer is simulated by the layer "above". That could continue ad infinitum or perhaps create a cycle, so eventually it's simulating itself. These may be what we refer to as simulations, like what's running on my PC, or some kind of emergent behavior. Either case seems to work.

It's natural to define the universe / all of reality / all layers as that which is self-defining, which is hard to describe without circular reasoning.

If you can recurse infinitely, then there is no need to define reality as a simulation. A simulation implies some loss of fidelity relative to the layer hosting it. If you continue this infinitely eventually you end up with a completely entropic layer. Maybe there is a discontinuity and this entropic layer crystallizes into a highly ordered "base reality". I don't know how this innermost, entropic layer can contain the outermost, ordered layer. I think "simulation" is a bad term since it implies a monotonic loss of fidelity.

A simulation only has meaning if there is a base reality. Otherwise there are only layers of reality.

I disagree. A simulation has meaning even if there is not a base reality.

A simulation is alterable in a way that a physicalists reality is not. For example by it's parent can slow it down, or alter physical constants.

A “slowing down” of a simulation would only be perceptible to those observing from without, not those who are observing from within, whose perceptive processes would be slowed in synchrony with the processes they are perceiving.

There's no reason to presume the simulation proceeds at a constant rate as measured from the outside world either: “render times” may vary with the complexity and fidelity required — for example when we innards fire up the LHC, a huge bump in resolution might be required. When we innards venture onto the moon, a whole new world has to be mapped in and professing speed might drop accordingly.

What the original poster is saying is that insofar as we do not know what the base reality is, there is no reason to argue that our reality is a lower-fidelity instantiation of it: we might as well be a flawless emulation of something totally orthogonal to the base reality.

Furthermore for obvious reasons computation cannot endlessly recurs endlessly and somehow forms into a loop: somewhere the arithmetic actually has to be performed.

I disagree with you that:

>and can impinge upon the simulations at any time

A simulation could just be some states. Consider the rule, double and subtract one to get to the next world-state, over the integers, and start the world with the state 1. So the next state is 1. The one after is also 1. The one after is also 1. The universe is stuck in a static state.

As I, you, or a Python script is modeling this universe, where does the outside universe "impinge" on it?

Then let's do a different universe, starting at 2. Then the next state is 3, the state afrer is 5, the state after is 9, and so forth.

As you do this universe in your head, where does the outside universe "impinge" on it?

There is a problem, however. All future states are well-defined in the universe I've given even if nobody in our universe or any other is calculating them.

It is trivially obvious that the human mind is an emergent property of its neural firings (of the brain), and that replacing some part of it with a black box that interacted with the rest would leave it with the same emergent properties, even if this black box were modeling in a different medium.

The question is, if you can model the whole thing over a well-defined program that did not require non pseudorandom entropy, then it would be similar (just start with more complex data than 1 or 2, and more complicated rules than double and subtract one) - so in order for these states to exist, would anyone have to actually calculate it, or is it enough for these states to be mathematically defined?

What I am saying is that it is a statistical certainty that within a thousand years we can create a deterministic model of a brain in a VR, where the brain reports consciousness. (this is 100.000% absolutely necessarily true and not open to debate. The brain is a couple of pounds of stufd, with just a few hundred billion neurons or fewer - I bet we could practically have the hardware to model one today.)

Does this mean that that model already exists? (before anyone chose to calculate it)?

This is similar to asking whether the quintillionth prime exists. Yes, of course it exists.

Really? Even if nobody calculates it? Then what is to say that we might not exist without anyone calculating us?

Perhaps the states of the universe, like the quintillionth prime, exist without anyone calculating it. Perhaps there is no underlying reality at all, just as there is not an underlying reality in which the quintillionth prime is embedded.

Reminds me of a short story called Luminous by Greg Egan. In that story the universe is a declarative system that does have a non-pseudo random component to it -- with actual reality being an emergent phenomenon between this declarative model and the entities within exploring that model by causing the universe to imbue the mathematical objects implied by the universe with specific reality by actually computing them, in so doing "expanding" the size of the universe and introducing new effects from this expansion into the evolution of the system ... in the story it turns out there are multiple actors active at the edge of defining the universe -- and their actions can actually influence the ability of other actors to continue in their participation in the universe creation process ...

Edit: my attempt to elaborate on the idea from the story ... I don't know if I can summarize the concept that well -- I think the framing within the story for the plot is something along the lines of: 1. Mathematical truth exists 2. There is an existential difference between a mathematical truth and a specific occurrence of the "pattern" described by that truth within the physical material of the universe.

I think the eli5 example in the story is based on the integers. You have the integers which are infinite, and you have an instantiated version of some number n if you have an occurrence of n things in nature. The reality of n is fundamentally different if you are in A universe with "n things" vs one with only m things m<n.

I think that's the motivation for the concept -- and in the story a researcher sets off to find scenarios where the universe had not yet "instantiated" one of the "laws" that could be derived from mathematical reality -- and ends up finding out that there is more than one possible way for the laws of "reality" to expand ... -- with different implications on what laws might be discovered in the future ...

This is really, really interesting. As I don't have access to the book just now, could you expand (by editing) your comment a little, your summary is very dense. I realize you might not remember it all exactly but it's really interesting to me.

EDIT: Thanks for the expansion! Fascinating and really interesting idea. The idea, "There is an existential difference between a mathematical truth and a specific occurrence of the 'pattern' described by that truth within the physical material of the universe" is a fascinating one.

> this is 100.000% absolutely necessarily true and not open to debate

That sounds completely absurd to me given that we can't even agree on a definition for consciousness.

It doesn't matter if you agree. Some of the world's 7 billion people likely believe that minds are like souls in a parallel ethereal plane and they could be severed, float around for a while, be attached to some other person and so forth. Regardless of whether anyone believes that it is just not true and conscienceness is an emergent propery of the person having it, and it doesn't really matter whether you or anyone else sees it that way.

It doesn't matter what you think conscienceness is or whether there is agreement on it. (Sorry if this is harsh.)

How can you be so confident? You have no proof of this (or at least have not demonstrated it) and are simply going on faith which is exactly what someone who says that consciousness comes from the soul is doing.

And even if consciousness is an emergent property of the structure of the brain, how could we have a simulated brain report that it is experiencing consciousness when we cant define what it is in the first place?

Suppose you couldn't define flight, and I said, of course flight is possible since birds fly so it would be possible to fly, flight is just the sum of the mechanical motions that it entails - whereas you claimed no, no, it's some kind of magic that Hermes, the god of flight deigns to imbue some creatures with. Even if you exactly copied every last muscle twitch in a bird with a mechanical version of the same, you claimed, there is no guarantee that Hermes would play along and magically make it fly, it could be an earthbound mechanical object, or even if it did appear to fly, since we don't have a good definition of flight how would we even know if it's really flying? It could just be appearing to fly but, since in our mythology Hermes doesn't make mechanical things fly, it really isn't flying...

it's not something that is even worth discussing. of course if you made an emulated version of a brain in a VR with the same structure and neurological action and it reported consciousness, then it would be conscious, of course, yes. This is like asking whether NES games can "really" be running in a browser, even if the browser is emulating an NES system and includes the code of the original cartridge. Is the game "really" running? Can you "really" play it? Meaningless questions. If the VR person with the same brain topology as a human and hundreds of billions of neurons reports consciousness then of course it has it. why would being emulated suddenly make it different from all 7 billion humans running natively in the world, especially if theoretically it could be compiled from the same source code (which we have a copy of, DNA was sequenced in full in the 90s).

Since my comment was about a thousand years out, there's no question and we don't need to discuss these things. It's open and shut. I don't need to give any citations.

So let's say that perhaps biological neurons are an antenna which picks up on a universal consciousness energy field and imbues consciousness into a brain and that thus far, or even 1000 years from now, this property has gone undetected. Simulating the known properties of the brain may make a program that functions in all respects like a brain but does not have consciousness. It might report that it has consciousness because that is some function of another property of the simulation however in this case we would know that it is not true.

I find it amusing that you think a topic as widely studied and disputed as consciousness is "open and shut" because of some assumptions that you choose to make. Nonetheless, I do appreciate hearing your perspective so thank you.

Yes, I may be butchering this (didn't read the link below) but perhaps in Descartes's philosophy the pineal gland is like a connection to the soul, sure, like an antenna to an ethereal world, in a physical organ.

I completely discount this possibility and think it's not worth discussing. So, you are right that my mind is very closed to any alternatives to what I've stated, though as in your example of an antenna, we could describe such alternatives rigorously. Not worth our time. (IMO). Thanks for the replies.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pineal-gland/

We would necessarily have a much better understanding of brains and consciousness if we were able to build a working brain simulation.