Virtual Machines and Consciousness
Epicurus
No one is arguing that dreams don’t exist and that they are not powerful. Events that occur in a virtual world such as a video game, or even an engrossing novel, can have profound effects on the experiencer’s life, emotions, and thought processes. The events occur in a virtual world as opposed to the objective real world. I think this misunderstanding is natural and goes all the way back to the first conscious humans, who naturally saw the dream state as a real physical place. Knowledge that a video game is not reality, or that a novel is fiction, in no way detracts from its wonderful and delightful value to give pleasure, excitement, or challenge to the person experiencing it. All experience, including virtual, has tangible affects on the mind. The point of disagreement is when claims of supernatural mysticism are used in relation to these virtual encounters.
>the necessary skepticism, but the fact is, dreams, in general, can
have
>a very powerful, insightful effect on the dreamer's life. My belief
is
>that life....reality.....is a dream, and that when are dreaming you
are
>I believe our existence is more than what we see in everyday, waking
life. I
>think the very root of our existence is indeed spiritual, to the
very
>sub-atomic particle and beyond.
The concept of "spiritual" originally meant having breath. Anyone who had breath had spiritus. Descartes’ view of duality of mind and body as separate entities has no objective support outside of religion. The latest ideas of cognitive theory view consciousness as an emergent phenomena that results from a myriad of parallel processes running simultaneously and interconnecting within a biocomputer which produces a virtual reality simulation of the real world. The internal virtual simulation of the individual in relation to the internal representation of the outside world produces our sense of self awareness or consciousness.
>After all, we have consciousness, not just thought, don't we? Such a
thing
>can't be easily explained. Think about it before posting, please. I
would like
Many things are not easily explained, but that doesn’t mean they are beyond explanation. Daniel Dennet in "Consciousness Explained" provides a much more satisfying explanation than myth and superstition have ever provided. "Here is the hypothesis I will defend:
Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes (or more exactly, meme-effects in brains) that can best be understood as the operation of a "von Neumannesque" virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which it runs, but at the same time many of its most curious features, and especially its limitations, can be explained as the byproducts of the kludges that make possible this curious but effective reuse of an existing organ for novel purposes." [Page 210]
"Anyone who is familiar with a word processor is acquainted with at least one virtual machine, and if you have used several different word processors, or used a spread sheet or played a game on the very same computer you use for word processing, you are acquainted with several virtual machines, taking turns existing on a particular real machine." [Page 211]
"[A] von Neumann machine is entirely unconscious; why should implementing it - or something like it: a Joycean machine - be any more conscious? I do have an answer: The von Neumann machine, by being wired up from the outset that way, with maximally efficient information links, didn't have to become the object of its own elaborate perceptual systems. The workings of the Joycean machine, on the other hand, are just as "visible" and "audible" to it as any of the things in the external world that it is designed to perceive - for the simple reason that they have much of the same perceptual machinery focused on them.
Now this appears to be a trick with mirrors, I know. And it certainly is counterintuitive, hard-to-swallow, initially outrageous - just what one would expect of an idea that could break through centuries of mystery, controversy, and confusion." [Page 226]
"The idea has been around for several years that human consciousness might ... be the activity of some sort of serial virtual machine implemented on the parallel hardware of the brain. The psychologist Stephen Kosslyn offered a version of the serial virtual machine idea at a meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in the early 1980s, and I have been trying out different versions of the idea since about the same time ... ." [Page 259]
"I hereby declare that YES, my theory is a theory of consciousness. Anyone or anything that has such a virtual machine as its control system is conscious in the fullest sense, and is conscious because it has such a virtual machine." [Page 281]