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June 4, 2017 — Greg Bishop

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mike said:
... Its actually going to be easier to prove it than disprove it ...
Click to expand...

LOL. That's seems to have been the attitude for how many generations? The best minds in philosophy still don't have an answer and some feel it's impossible. We've been on this over in the consciousness thread for I don't know how many hundreds of pages, and it's the same old question: What constitutes proof? There's simply no way for you to know with 100% certainty anything but you is actually experiencing consciousness. That level of proof is unobtainable. An AI could theoretically be programmed to respond with all the possible arguments that it is conscious being, and maybe even create new arguments, but that's still just conveying information, not consciousness.

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Which brings us to ET.
How will we know if they are conscious , when we are not even sure we are.
Is looking like a duck and quacking like a duck enough ?

What if it looks biological and passes the Turing test but is in fact wholly synthetic ?

And is it really important ?
 
mike said:
Which brings us to ET.
How will we know if they are conscious , when we are not even sure we are.
Is looking like a duck and quacking like a duck enough ?

What if it looks biological and passes the Turing test but is in fact wholly synthetic ?

And is it really important ?
Click to expand...

You are right. There is no way to know with any certainty. I like the idea that we could be seeing something that appears "conscious" simply because it reflects us back to ourselves with a slightly imperfect mirror. Maybe that qualifies as something separate and "intelligent."
 
I know 100% for sure that I'm conscious. I can't be 100% sure anyone else is conscious. However, I can prove within a reasonable standard of certainty that humans are conscious because they all have the same biology that I do. Perhaps some sort of similar analysis can be done to proof that something non-human is conscious?
 
A swath of technologists and physicists believe that ‘simulation theory’ will be proved, just as it was proved that the Earth was not the center of the universe

Is our world a simulation? Why some scientists say it's more likely than not

A long-shot method to test one type of simulation hypothesis was proposed in 2012 in a joint paper by physicists Silas R. Beane from the University of Bonn (now at the University of Washington, Seattle), and Zohreh Davoudi and Martin J. Savage from the University of Washington, Seattle.[12] Under the assumption of finite computational resources, the simulation of the universe would be performed by dividing the continuum space-time into a discrete set of points. In analogy with the mini-simulations that lattice-gauge theorists run today to build up nuclei from the underlying theory of strong interactions (known as Quantum chromodynamics), several observational consequences of a grid-like space-time have been studied in their work. Among proposed signatures is an anisotropy in the distribution of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, that, if observed, would be consistent with the simulation hypothesis according to these physicists
 
What they find is interesting. They say that the lattice spacing imposes a fundamental limit on the energy that particles can have. That’s because nothing can exist that is smaller than the lattice itself.

So if our cosmos is merely a simulation, there ought to be a cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles.

It turns out there is exactly this kind of cut off in the energy of cosmic ray particles, a limit known as the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin or GZK cut off.

The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation
 
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