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Statistical Mentality
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by nickland @ Wednesday, 18 May 2011 17:17
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Things are very probably weirder than they seem
As the natural sciences have developed to encompass increasingly complex systems,
scientific rationality has become ever more statistical, or probabilistic. The deterministic
classical mechanics of the enlightenment was revolutionized by the near-equilibrium
statistical mechanics of late 19th century atomists, by quantum mechanics in the early 20th
century, and by the far-from-equilibrium complexity theorists of the later 20th century.
Mathematical neo-Darwinism, information theory, and quantitative social sciences
compounded the trend. Forces, objects, and natural types were progressively dissolved
into statistical distributions: heterogeneous clouds, entropy deviations, wave functions,
gene frequencies, noise-signal ratios and redundancies, dissipative structures, and
complex systems at the edge of chaos.
By the final decades of the 20th century, an unbounded probabilism was expanding into
hitherto unimagined territories, testing deeply unfamiliar and counter-intuitive arguments
in statistical metaphysics, or statistical ontology. It no longer sufficed for realism to attend
to multiplicities, because reality was itself subject to multiplication.
In his declaration cogito ergo sum, Descartes concluded (perhaps optimistically) that the
existence of the self could be safely concluded from the fact of thinking. The statistical
ontologists inverted this formula, asking: given my existence (which is to say, an existence
that seems like this to me), what kind of reality is probable? Which reality is this likely to
be?
MIT Roboticist Hans Moravec, in his 1988 book Mind Children, seems to have initiated the
genre. Extrapolating Moore’s Law into the not-too-distant future, he anticipated
computational capacities that exceeded those of all biological brains by many orders of
magnitude. Since each human brain runs its own more-or-less competent simulation of the
world in order to function, it seemed natural to expect the coming technospheric
intelligences to do the same, but with vastly greater scope, resolution, and variety. The
mass replication of robot brains, each billions or trillions of times more powerful than
those of its human progenitors, would provide a substrate for innumerable, immense, and
minutely detailed historical simulations, within which human intelligences could be
reconstructed to an effectively-perfect level of fidelity.
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This vision feeds into a burgeoning literature on non-biological mental substrates, consciousness
whole-brain emulations (‘ems’), and Matrix-style artificial realities. Since the realities we presently
(let us momentarily assume) on biological signal-processing systems with highly-finite quantitativ
reason to confidently anticipate that an ‘artificial’ reality simulation would be in any way distingui
Is ‘this’ history or its simulation? More precisely: is ‘this’ a contemporary biological (brain-based)
artificial memory, run on a technological substrate ‘in the future’? That is a question without class
It can only be approached, rigorously, with statistics, and since the number of fine-grained simula
probably vast), overwhelmingly exceeds the number of actual or original histories (for the sake of
probabilistic calculus points unswervingly towards a definite conclusion: we can be near-certain th
simulation run by artificial (or post-biological) intelligences at some point in ‘our future’. At least
present themselves – we can be extremely confident, on grounds of statistical ontology, that our
not historical reconstruction, it might be a game or fiction).
Nick Bostrom formalizes the simulation argument in his article ‘The Simulation Argument: Why th
Living in the Matrix is Quite High’ (found here):
Now we get to the core of the simulation argument. This does not purport to demonstrate that yo
it shows that we should accept as true at least one of the following three propositions:
(1) The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before
mature is negligibly small
(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations
(3) You are almost certainly in a simulation.
Each of these three propositions may be prima facie implausible; yet, if the simulation argument
(it does not tell us which).
If obstacles to the existence of high-level simulations (1 and 2) are removed, then statistical reaso
exact track laid down by Moravec. We are “almost certainly” inhabiting a “computer simulation tha
advanced civilization” because these saturate to near-exhaustion the probability space for realitie
simulations exist, original lives would be as unlikely as winning lottery tickets, at best.
Bostrom concludes with an intriguing and influential twist:
If we are in a simulation, is it possible that we could know that for certain? If the simulators don’t
probably never will. But if they choose to reveal themselves, they could certainly do so. Maybe a w
fact would pop up in front of you, or maybe they would “upload” you into their world. Another eve
with a very high degree of confidence that we are in a simulation is if we ever reach the point wh
our own simulations. If we start running simulations, that would be very strong evidence against
us with only (3).
If we create fine-grained reality simulations, we demonstrate – to a high level of statistical confide
one, and that the history leading up to this moment of creation was fake. Paul Almond, an enthusi
draws out the radical implication – reverse causation – asking: Can you retroactively put yourself in a
Such statistical ontology, or Bayesian existentialism, is not restricted to the simulation argument.
discussions of the Anthropic Principle, of the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and
from the Doomsday Argument to Quantum Suicide (and Immortality).
Whatever is really happening, we probably have to chance it.
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