Getting Over Dust Theory

I agree, and say we are in a simulation. I'm not sure what the precise definition of 'simulation' is, but it should be a broad enough concept to include the universe, whatever the universe is. The universe may not be a directed simulation, it may not be a simulation that has a beginning and an end, and even the continuity of it may be a complete illusion. But I cannot imagine how anything at a sufficient level of detail could be interpreted as not a simulation; that is, as something that isn't computed or doesn't run with some mix of mechanical and random rules.

In the context of the point of view that everything is a 'simulation', if "actual reality" is fragmented or in any other way fundamentally really, really different from my subjective experience, I don't care. I care about understanding the reality of the simulation I'm in. I only care about any reality outside the simulation to the extent it affects my simulation. And I believe I'm thoroughly justified in this focus of interest. If everything is a simulation, why should simulation B nested within larger simulation A be less "real" than A? I have no evidence that simulation B is fragile or inconsistent, so that I need to be prepared for A tomorrow.

If Nemo told me today that this world is The Matrix, I would be very excited at first, but I would also temper my excitement until he answered my question whether any of the rules are different inside the simulation than what we thought. If there's no magic, no way to get the simulation to do something cool, then ultimately it just wouldn't make a difference. Reality is as real as it ever was.

A 'less real' reality is only a reality that is inconsistent, that provides evidence of a parent reality that is arbitrarily manipulating the simulation in some way. Thus finally, I would define a simulation as "subjectively unreal" only if the simulation is impossible for the subjects to model without a model of the parent.

don't think there's a meaningful difference between "the real world" and a perfect simulation of it (at least seen "from the inside") -

What's the meaning of meaningful? Do you mean that you literally cannot understand the opposite of simulationism? Or are using "meaningful" to mean "empirically confirmable"? The empirical indetectability of a simulation follows from simulations premises, right enough....but it cannot be used to argue for them.

This snide comment does not contribute to the making of paperclips. Clippy fail.

That's not what she said. Still, I would also appreciate elaboration of the involvement of being female.

I can sort-of see the plausibility in how women were more strongly selected for modeling others' feelings, but I'm not sure that's what byrnema meant.

*exceptions: germline cells and immune system cells.

No, no... I just meant my gene expression.

It is rather that the computational theory of mind doens't strongly imply Dust Theory.

Ah. Well, I certainly agree with that.

Well, I agree we need to base theory on observable facts. Dust theory is more of a thought experiment or problem related to the nature of consciousness, which is not something we've been able to attack empirically. Nonetheless, Egan dismisses it with this "orderly universe" business. I'm arguing that there is a selection bias - if dust theory were true then only in an "orderly universe" do we argue about dust theory.

But I'm starting to come around to the position I think most of you are taking, which is that this is just a "pink unicorn" what-if proposition that isn't worth contemplating - since we do in fact have an orderly universe which seems to account for things the way they are.

My problem is that once I accept the information state theory of consciousness, "dust based" conscious entities seems like an inevitable result, unless the actual universe is sufficiently bounded in time and space that the statistical likliehood of this is prohibitive.

But for anyone that adopts a many-worlds interpretation of QM or any variant of cosmology theory that yields an unbounded configuration space then I don't see a way around this problem.

It's unlikely that there are no few reasons much more powerful than all the rest, that everything is aligned exactly. So if one is tempted to explain using many weak reasons, or any reasons visibly weaker than other known reasons, that would suggest that the weak reasons are fake explanations obscuring what's really going on, even if all of these reasons are true.

It's funny that the ideas humans spend most of their time thinking and debating about are implicitly ideas about thinking and debating and yet they never really get around to thinking and debating explicitly about thinking and debating because the thinking and debating is actually about signaling object-level thinking and debating skills and not the less desirable meta-level ones. It wasn't really until the Greeks' development of rhetoric and logic that this trend was slightly reversed; now explicit meta-level reasoning has leaked down somewhat into modern-day implicit object-level reasoning, and explicit meta-level reasoning is a huge financial sector in the form of consultancy. But even so explicit meta-level reasoning is rarely seen in the wild.

possibility is necessity

That statement is just mystical dogma unless you can explain why they are the same thing. And just saying "all possible worlds exist" does not explain why they exist. Why not just some of them? Why any of them at all?

Well my comment wasn't an objection to Tegmark's mutliverse hypothesis but rather an explanation as to why its the only explanation you've ever heard.

But if may object to your objection, I disagree that QM is so very tidy. The standard model has what - 18 free parameters with values assigned as necessary to fit the experimental data? I don't know that anyone considers this tidy, or that many people think particle physics is "done". What we have for particle physics is a useful mathematical model but it isn't an elegant one.

The expectation that we should find an elegant model is not unreasonable but it is not yet accomplished.

That said, it isn't obvious to me why causation would be necessary for consciousness.

How about "consciousness is computation, and causation is necesary for computation".

Say we simulate your brain and record the simulation. We then divide the recording into 100,000 pieces, scramble them, and put them back together. Then we play the recording. The Dust theory says that the recording will be conscious just in no way proceeding along the arrow of time the way we are. Is the recording still a causal system?

Yes. But who ever said that any old causation is necesary for consciousness? Both computationalism and phsyicalism say consc.is a particular kind of causal process. The causation of playing back a simulation is not the causation of generating it in the first place.

It's empirically wrong: my experiences have been highly ordered in the past and so I expect them to be ordered in the future, and not to jump randomly around the universe just because there exist embodiments of every possible future state I might experience.

Just because the encoding of the different states are scattered about the universe doesn't mean the conscious experience does not appear to be contiguous and linear to the observer; while they'd be in the minority in an infinite configuration space it is impossible that there won't be states without memories of contiguous experiences.

Also, I agree. Based on our experiences we can conclude that we are not dust-minds.

Could either of you explain how you would expect your current state of consciousness with its memories of experiences to be any different from how it is now if it were a dust-mind?

I successfully referred to something with the phrase. I know I did because your response wasn't "Huh? What does that word mean?"

That's also true of things like the Christian Trinity and immortal souls and consciousness and acausal free will. All these words refer to things that are untestable and unobservable, or are described in internally inconsistent ways (logical impossibilities); those of them that could potentially exist, don't exist as a matter of fact; and some of them are just meaningless strings of words.

The real referent in these cases is just the sum of everything people tend to say or feel about these supposed concepts.

I'm more that open to the suggestion that subject experience is a illusion or an error-- but it is the constitutive feature of our existence. Curious people aren't going to just stop talking about it without a very good reason. The burden is on those who don't think it should be discussed, to explain why.

I certainly agree that experience exists - I know I have mine, everyone else says the same about themselves. But if we insist on treating it as purely subjective experience, then we'll never be able to say anything about it, pretty much by definition. In my experience all those curious people are talking about badly-understood notions deriving from beliefs of body-mind duality. No matter how much we learn about objective experience, even if we can manipulate somebody's experience in any way we like, people can still say they don't understand subjective experience.

It's easy to think that because we experience things (as a verb), there must be some subjective experience to talk about. But my position is that if we can't formulate a question about subjective experience - a question that will make us behave differently depending on the answer - then there's nothing to talk about. We can go searching for answers, but there's no such thing as searching for a question. Are we supposed to one day think of a question and be enlightened? But that question exists in its own right, and can be answered if we ever think it's important in the way that any question may be important. Meanwhile, if we have some kind of psychological drive to look for The Question, we might as well ignore that drive or look for a way to suppress it - just as we do with other unprofitable, un-fullfillable drives.

That's my position, anyway...

Agreed. This is a good line of attack. Egan's response in the FAQ is:

some people have suggested that a sequence of states could only experience consciousness if there was a genuine causal relationship between them. The whole point of the Dust Theory, though, is that there is nothing more to causality than the correlations between states.

I don't really know where he is coming from. If that is "the point" of Dust theory I don't see how he as made that argument. It looks to me like brains and genuine simulations are indeed causal but arbitrary patterns are not.

In a timeless view, causality is just (regular) correlation in spacetime, as Egan says. I'm not sure what you are saying, though.

I also asked if simulating one or just a few mental states, instead of the whole evolution of your mental state over time, created some kind of subjective experience? In that case, would it be morally wrong to keep a highly detailed scan of your brain taken when you were feeling sad?

That said, it isn't obvious to me why causation would be necessary for consciousness. Say we simulate your brain and record the simulation. We then divide the recording into 100,000 pieces, scramble them, and put them back together. Then we play the recording. The Dust theory says that the recording will be conscious just in no way proceeding along the arrow of time the way we are. Is the recording still a causal system?

That's entirely a matter of definition - the definitions of "consciousness" and of "causality". You can define them any way you like, but what do you actually learn about reality from this?

This part of Dust theory strikes me as leading up to the conclusion that "there are many conscious states!" without defining what consciousness means, and so not actually saying anything.

Regarding the rest of the objection...

You don't address my central claim: that the mapping of 'mental states' to the physical representation used is arbitrary. If I can build a physics-simulator as a state machine encoding complete rules of physical evolution, then by the principles of Turing equivalence, I can build some other machine that uses any mapping I like from physical states to numbers (each number representing the simulator's state). Does it then generate subjective experience in "someone", and is it morally significant, to feed that machine some given number - even the number 1 for instance - because I built the machine to represent torture with that number?

You say of this,

You definitely can't just say of some set of patterns "These are Jack suffering" and make them that way.

But why not? I can choose the mapping as I like.

To be sure there is a mind and to specify a particular experience of me suffering I suspect you would have to actually simulate me suffering.

Do you mean that it's difficult to get the information needed to build a machine that correctly maps the number 1 to your suffering?

I can do this, for instance, by observing you in a normal state - recording what your brain looks like - then applying my understanding of nervous systems pain signals to build a description of your brain suffering pain. It's not difficult in principle.

Or do you mean I might simulate your brain suffering without thereby creating a suffering mind? Why? And why would this be anything more than a matter of arbitrary definition?

My logic isn't invalid. I addition to their being mental states with relation K to your final mental state there are some such states where you are happy and others in which you experience eternal torture. That is also a consequence of the argument.

That means there are (infinitely) many entities you are, with many different experiences. And all of them are you. That sounds like an... unorthodox use of the word "you" :-)

The problem is that you have not defined what 'you' means in this context.

My position on this is basically that our concept of personhood confuses types and tokens because it was developed in a world where every person had only one token. The fact that our concept of personal identity isn't equipped to deal with the Dust argument isn't really a point against it.

Why call this hypothetical collection of persons "you" (or indeed "me") if it contains many different persons and doesn't match our existing use of the word "you"?

Clarifying: Is the "Subjective Dust Theory" different from some other Dust theory as you understand it? I'm trying to describe Egan's Dust theory.

I coined the term "subjective Dust theory" to mean Dust theory as applied to me and my subjective experience (producing conclusions such as "I'm necessarily immortal"), as opposed to Dust theory applied to other minds.

Also, I agree. Based on our experiences we can conclude that we are not dust-minds.

Obligatory question: given what observations would you assign high probability to the possibility that you are a dust-mind? Why would you privilege it over competing theories, which include:

• You, but not all other possible experiences, are being simulated by someone for some reason.
• Your memory or other parts of your mind are faulty, making you falsely remember or experience a chaotic universe (or whatever it is you observed).
• Someone is deliberately messing / has messed with your mind, result as above.
• You are a Boltzmann brain. (Unlike a dust-mind, you live normally over time, it's just that you and your surroundings were created out of chaos by chance.)

Arguably, each of these theories is much more specific than the idea that you're a dust-mind. That is, Dust theory predicts that there will be (infinitely many?) versions of you, some of which are being simulated, others have faulty memory, yet others are having their minds messed with by aliens, and still others are genuine Boltzmann brains. So in the absence of evidence to choose one of these, we should stick with the most general applicable theory - Dust theory.

On the other hand, the classes of all simulations and of all Boltzmann-brains also include all dust-minds... (You can simulate a universe containing a dust mind, and a a dust mind's states can come about by Boltzmann chance.) So it's not conclusive.

I STILL am noticing that.

When you say you are still noticing it, what you are saying is that you have a memory of noticing it before, and you perceive it now. Talking to me about experiencing the passage of time amounts to just saying "dust theory is wrong". I agree with that conclusion, but you haven't given me any information I don't already seem to have 33 years worth of.

All existing minds that we know of (human, animal - even including any computation that responds to the world - even down to a thermostat) consists of causally connected states.

That's not data. That's a definition.