on the simulation argument and virtual worlds

a semi-technical stream of consciousness

The simulation argument

Over the last five years, technologists have begun to dogmatically accept the idea that we live in a simulation — the theory was popularized by Nick Bostrom, and discourse turned mainstream when Elon Musk declared that the odds that we are living in a base-reality is one in billions.

I am neither completely satisfied with the Bostromian account of a simulated reality, nor can I reject the idea of a simulated reality entirely. Below is an exploration into the different types of possible simulated realities:

(1) The ‘mind is a simulation’ possibility

Different religious scriptures converge on the idea that the mind is a simulated reality. While ancient scriptures may not serve as compelling support for/against an account of the nature of reality, they provide useful intuitions for understanding the essence of the world through time and space. According to Buddhist and Vedantic philosophies, a mind — consisting of tendencies, desires, and sensations — is a simulated reality. Our subjective experience is a product of simulations produced by neurobiological chemicals — we can escape our simulated reality to enter a base reality, and experience raw/authentic consciousness, by practicing bottom-up perception exercises (eg: breathing, meditation, controlling the direction of attention & subsequent flow of thought) to widen our sensory abilities and retain control over our perceptual experience.

In essence, resigning attentional control leaves an individual’s subjective experience to be controlled by the simulation — or the mind — while learning how to control it allows an individual to experience the authentic base-reality.

---

Simulations can be classified into two types: h-style and s-style. Conscious beings in h-style simulations are the result of tampering with neural hardware. Examples include the brain-in-vat example, Matrix-like situations, and the theory above. By contrast, s-style simulations are run on computer software alone — an example includes Bostrom’s theory that most humans alive today are actually sophisticated ‘ancestor-simulations’ run at some point in the future by our descendants. The theory below describes another s-style simulation: the idea that our entire universe is a complex simulation run by some parent universe.

(2) A more advanced species in a parent-universe could have generated consciousness in our simulated child-universe.

The most compelling support for this possibility would be if humans are able to instantiate consciousness in a machine, thereby demonstrating that deliberate consciousness-production is nomologically possible, and that similarly, we may be a simulated product of a more advanced species.

Consciousness can come in degrees (eg: a snail vs. a dog vs. a monkey vs. a human). Somehow, without determining the parameters for how to measure consciousness, we have arbitrarily classified entities as conscious (eg: spider) and non-conscious (eg: an autopoietic cell). If the complex organisation of different types of non-conscious cells can produce a conscious being, it is possible that a similarly complex network of silicon-based computers may produce consciousness (there is no reason to believe that consciousness must be restricted to carbon substrates).