David Chalmers, University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and Co-Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University, hat sich anhand der neuen Virtual Realität-Technologien die Frage gestellt, was die Natur unserer Realität ist. Er stellt klar fest, virtuelle Realität ist reale Realität, nicht Illusion. Und möglicherweise genau so lebenswert wie die von uns als primäre Realität erlebte Erfahrung. Ausführlich legt er das in einem Interview auf Edge.org dar.

Mit der künstlich erzeugten virtuellen Realität stellt sich ganz von allein die Frage, wieweit unsere erlebte Realität nicht allenfalls auch virtuell ist. Möglicherweise das Produkt eines begabten Programmierers eine Stufe höher. Vielleicht ist er aber selbst nur wieder virtuelles Erzeugnis einer nochmals höheren Stufe.

Die Idee ist nicht neu. Tipler wirft die genau gleiche Frage in seiner “Physik der Unsterblichkeit” auf.  Das war vor 20 Jahren als virtuelle Realität noch nicht gängiger Begriff war. Damals kannte man die Technik der Emulation – bspw. ein Commodore 64 auf einem Windows 7-Computer. Auch das erlaubt die Vorstellung einer unendlichen Reihe von  Informationsverarbeitungs-Prozessen. Aber die stets neuste Technologie ist auch die naheliegendste für gängige Metaphern. Ist sie deshalb auch besser? Ist unsere Realität, die erfahrene, so problemlos als virtuell zu empfinden? Ich meine nein.

Die virtuelle Realität beruht auf Pixeln, reiner Oberfläche. Der Mensch hat grosse physische Tiefe. An die 100 Mrd. Zellen und noch mehr Mikroben. Nicht dass sich das computermässig nicht simulieren liesse, aber es ist wenig zweckmässig, auch wenn die enorme Datenmenge in einer mehr oder weniger fernen Zukunft zu bewältigen wäre, auch von 7 Mrd. Menschen samt fortlaufender Veränderung dierser Zellhaufen. Für mein Gefühl scheitert die Metapher der Wirklichkeit als denkbarem virtuellen Konstrukt daran. Es macht keinen Sinn. Wenn schon, scheint mir Tiplers Emulation überzeugender. Aber es bleibt stets die Gefahr durch die Verführung durch Metaphern, die als Wirklichkeitsbilder missverstanden werden (bspw. ganz schlimm das Hirn als Computer).

Links

Edge.org (Video), InstaPaper

Sound

Zitate

What’s artificial intelligence? That’s an artificial mind. What’s virtual reality? That’s an artificial world. This is great for a philosopher because philosophy, as I see it, is all about thinking about the nature of the mind, the nature of the world, and the connection between them. Thinking about artificial minds and artificial worlds can shed a lot of light on the mind and the world more generally.

Full-scale virtual reality is an immersive, interactive, computer-generated environment. Ordinary physical reality meets two of those three conditions: it’s immersive—it feels like I’m in the middle of it—and it’s interactive. I’m interacting with it, but it’s presumably not computer generated, so it only meets two out of three.
I’m inclined to think this is, again, the wrong way to think about virtual reality or simulations. Simulated worlds are perfectly real worlds, they’re just digital worlds—worlds fundamentally grounded in information.

You might think that a virtual reality would be too insubstantial to be a genuine reality.  If we’re in a virtual reality, objects are not solid the way things seem to be.  But we know from physics that objects are mostly empty space.  What makes them some of them count as solid is the way they interact with each other.  And that pattern of interaction can be present in a virtual reality.

You might also worry about space.  Some people think that if we’re in a virtual reality, objects aren’t spread out in space the way they seem to be.  But relativity, quantum mechanics, and other more recent theories increasingly suggest that nothing fully satisfies our intuitive conception of space as a sort of primitive container of matter.  Like solidity, space is grounded in the way things interact with each other.

Now some people, of course, have speculated that we ourselves may be living in a virtual reality, that our own environment may be virtual. This is the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation and have been since the beginning. That’s the hypothesis made famous by movies like The Matrix.

If unsimulated beings are a minority, it’s more likely that we’re one of the simulated beings way down there. Now there are various ways that reasoning can go wrong, but at the very least it gives us some reason to take seriously the hypothesis that we could be inhabiting a virtual reality and to think about what follows.

You can see the simulation hypothesis, the hypothesis that we’re in a simulation as a version of the multiverse idea, that there are multiple universes coexisting.
Maybe there’s a theology here. Whoever created our universe—the simulator—in a way, that’s our god, our creator. This being might be all-powerful, able to control our universe, all-knowing.

So even if there is a locally all-powerful creator, wonderful, but I’m not going to erect a religion around you. I’d be inclined to say, at best, these beings—our simulators—might be gods with a lower case g, not Gods with a capital G.

The chances are the god that you’re going to get from this simulation theology is an extremely watered-down god that would probably seem somewhat blasphemous from the perspective of traditional religion.

It could well be that we’re in a simulation. Maybe we’ll never get proof of this. Or if we’re not maybe we also can’t get proof. So I don’t want to say we’re exactly in the territory of a scientific hypothesis. This is more of a philosophical hypothesis.

Some people might speculate on the possibilities of an afterlife: If we are ultimately code, then that code could be uploaded into a different environment, maybe into the environment of the next universe up. Think of it as a science-compatible version of ordinary religion.

Within a decade or two I’m sure we’re going to have virtual reality that begins to be, visually and auditorily at least, indistinguishable from worlds like ours.

Some things are going to take a while to build into virtual reality, but I suspect within a century there will be Matrix-style virtual reality, which is more or less indistinguishable from our kind of reality.

Someone once said, “If a mind was so simple we could understand it, we’d be too simple to understand the mind.” So maybe there is something essentially complex and inexplicable about the mind. Maybe part of the charm of deep learning is that it’s a machine-learning system that develops things we don’t fully understand and couldn’t have predicted in advance.