The Culture War #79 Creationism vs Simulation Theory Debate, God or Atheism w/Roman Yampolskiy & Brian Sauve
Host:
Tim Pool @Timcast (everywhere)
Guests:
Roman Yampolskiy @romanyam (X)
Brian Sauve @Brian_Sauve (X)
Ian Crossland @IanCrossland (everywhere)
Producers:
Lisa Elizabeth @LisaElizabeth (X)
Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X)
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There's this ongoing joke that—there's two, actually.
One is, I don't know, at some point in 2016, the Large Hadron Collider in Europe fired up and shattered reality, accidentally making Donald Trump the president, and now we're trapped in some strange, fragmented universe where nothing quite makes sense.
And you got the Mandela Effect and all that.
But the other joke is that there are writers who are writing everything that's going on.
And people often say the writers of season two are rehashing old ideas or whatever that may be.
But what's funny about this is the joke behind all of it is that certainly we live in a constructed reality of some sort because it is much too interesting right now with everything that's going on.
I have to make the point that we've lived through, I don't know what, 50 historical moments this year alone?
I don't know if 50 is the right number, but I mean, at least in the past decade, it's been some substantial number.
And it's just the internet has sped up the rate of communication, resulting in it feeling like history is smashing us in the face.
Or, perhaps this is all part of God's plan and something significant is happening and we are here and facing a test.
Or, additionally, we're in a simulation!
And people are watching.
Now, I like the idea that we're in a simulation and we're just entertainment for some species somewhere else, just watching and enjoying the show and laughing that Donald Trump is president.
But we're gonna have a big conversation about religion, spirituality, simulation, theory, all of these things.
And so we've got a couple of guests who are joining us.
I don't know if you wanna go first, Roman, introduce yourself.
unidentified
Sure.
I'm Roman Yampolsky.
I'm faculty at the university.
I do research on computer science, artificial intelligence, superintelligence, cybersecurity.
So simulation is kind of a small subtopic within that bigger, very interesting framework.
Well, my name is Brian Sauve, and I am a Christian pastor out in Ogden, Utah, of a church called Refuge Church.
It's a Protestant Reformed Church, and I'm also the founder and president of a publishing company called New Christendom Press.
Where I release music, finishing a book, and most importantly for this conversation, do a couple podcasts.
One of them is called Haunted Cosmos, where my co-host Ben Garrett and I talk about the intersection of Christian theology with high strangeness, allegedly supernatural phenomena, government conspiracy, and anything else that interests us because we can do whatever we want.
It's our show.
And we talk a lot about materialism, and its failure as an explanatory mechanism for the world, and that sort of thing.
But let's... So we're gonna get into it, and then also Ian is here, and for a couple reasons.
Ian has long questioned spirituality and existence on TimCast IRL, and many people often ask him to sit down with learned men who can help him better understand the nature of reality.
And so I figure Ian adds that wildcard element and the questions of all of these things, which will be rather interesting.
But where should we begin, I suppose?
I saw you were mentioned online in a tweet where you said something to the effect of, it's too interesting right now.
And that is evidence that we are living in a simulation.
How so?
I mean, I think we all get it, but let's start there.
Why does that make you think we're living in a simulation?
unidentified
That's a great question, and people question it.
They tell me, no, no, no, it's not the most interesting times.
People always believed that.
You know, somebody invented fire, invented wheel.
It's going to be interesting in that way.
The difference is we're hitting meta-interesting stuff.
We are starting to create intelligence.
So a requirement for having simulations and we're starting to create realistic simulations.
So that's two meta factors.
If I was running ancestral simulations, I would be interested in that time frame.
This is where it's who's going to create superintelligence?
Will they be able to control it?
Can they tell the real world from fake world, setting up ethics for future simulations?
But I think If we're gonna base it off of... There's a lot more to break down in simulation theory, too, especially, but if we're gonna base, you know, what's happening now and what's interesting, if we're gonna use that as a basis for why we're in a simulation, I honestly just default to, we are entertainment, and if we as a civilization were to create simulations, what would they be for?
Sure, I guess universities are running simulations, I guess, but that's probably a tiny, tiny fraction of the simulations that exist.
Probably tens of thousands of different simulations that exist in video games, emulated reality for a variety of reasons, and it is only a small fraction of these simulated realities that actually exist as some kind of research.
I think it stands to reason that we exist in some kind of entertainment, and I think the first thing we are probably going to do with AI Why make TV shows anymore?
Why hire crews and cameras and lighting and writers when we can just create a million different AI simulated realities and then let a decentralized network figure out what is the most interesting one to watch and you've got a bunch of weird alien creatures or even humans sitting at their computers and they're all hitting the like button on
Earth 2024 and this one dude sitting in his pod eating roaches and he's like, guys, guys, Donald Trump became president in this one!
And then everyone starts watching.
And so it seems to me that if we are in a simulation, it's probably more likely entertainment than research.
Anecdotally, I vaped DMT for the first time in my life, and I witnessed these creatures.
First of all, I just saw spiraling shape patterns, like the letter A, the letter F on its side, like a triangle, and they were like ribbons of patterns of numbers and shapes.
And then these ribbons became three-dimensional, and then they became the outline of this woman's arm, and she was waving me towards her.
allowed the visualization to continue.
And then all of a sudden it was like three beings, this woman, this male being, they were like shimmering light.
And they saw me and they were highly entertained.
This is part of when you're saying that you think it's entertainment for some other sort of being.
I think you might be right.
And they were fascinated that I could see them.
They were like elated that I could see them.
It was like a video game character that realizes it's a video game character.
And I was the video game character for them.
I don't know if it was just pure hallucination.
I'm not the only one that's talked about this kind of thing either, and it wasn't like I wanted to experience that.
That's just what happened after I puffed the stuff.
I think it's interesting how it relates to this simulation concept, because I do think that all of you are noticing something that is true.
As a cultural phenomena, even.
I think that you guys are noticing that this world does not just seem to be a sort of accidental collision of a bunch of stuff that's roiling around.
And that there is some sort of meaning behind reality.
There's some sort of mind behind reality.
There's some sort of designing, architecting, arch-storyteller behind reality.
And that you can engage with consciousness that is not just human.
I think all of that's true.
However, I believe that that story is much better, all of that data is much better explained, not by a simulation.
Which I actually think might be a formally self-contradictory idea, an idea that if it's true it can't be true, but that it's better explained by the classical understanding of the Christian God, that we do live in a story, not a simulation is how I'd put it, that's being told by God, and that He is
All powerful, all good, and all wise, all the omnis, and he's therefore able to, when he tells a story, it's not just words on a page like when we tell a story, as his sub-creators made in his image, but it's actually real, and it has extension in space, and even establishes the validity of second causes, and allows for real will and real freedom, which is another thing that I think simulation theory would obliterate, would be the possibility of human freedom,
and the reality of human will, I think it would end up being a deterministic world where all meaning is destroyed, and even the possibility of justified and rational knowledge.
If you're in a simulation, how do we arrive at knowledge?
Well, we deploy our senses, sense data, and we deploy reason.
So we look at our sense data and we compare it to what seem to be necessary abstract objects like the laws of logic, the law of non-contradiction.
And in a simulation, backing up, I would say that In order for a person to reason in a way that would be rationally justified, he actually has to believe that his mechanisms for data input and analysis of that data is reliable.
However, if we live in a simulation, then both of those things are destroyed.
Because all of our sense data is actually deceiving us.
It's making us believe something that's not true.
And I also think on a meta level, and this is really more of a philosophical question than a technological question, but I think that on the meta level, it can't actually account for things like abstract.
objects, like the laws of logic, laws of mathematics, moral realities, things like that.
Unless somewhere in the simulation, even if you went to base reality and you asked the question of, is base reality a meat space?
Like, you know, people joke about in Minecraft meat space.
Is it that kind of...
Is it like us?
Like what we think we are?
Or is it itself a transcendent reality?
And at some point you have to reason back to, where did this come from?
What's behind it?
What accounts for those abstract moral objects and abstract laws of logic?
And on that end, I think you still have to posit God.
How do you define God?
So God is a necessary being.
He's a non-contingent being.
Unlike us, we're contingent beings.
Even if simulation theory is true, this is true.
exist contingently, meaning we don't have to exist, and we exist because of some other thing that upholds it.
So God is a self-existent, necessary being who is maximally good in every way, and therefore he's timeless, changeless, immensely powerful, and he exists outside of his creation and yet is imminent in his creation.
I would say that all things exist within God.
All things are not God, I'm not a panentheist, but they exist within.
I don't see this as being contradictory to simulation theory.
Yeah, if, you know, often Seamus Coughlin and I, when we would discuss these things, we would say simulation theory seems to be a sci-fi labeling of religious theory in a lot of ways.
And so what you were saying about knowledge not being possible, I can't agree and disagree, but so I'll explain.
Knowledge of the existence beyond the simulation would be impossible.
You could only know an experience when the simulation was designed to allow you to know an experience.
But that could be stated exactly as, if the universe is a construct of God, you can only know and experience what God has allowed within this reality for you to know and experience.
You know, Ian talks about machine elves and experiencing these things, and those are still within the realm of human perception and consciousness.
unidentified
I would love to talk more about that, too, at some point.
But I hear these stories about, you know, past near-death experiences where people feel like there's a giant ball of energy that they're drifting towards or something to this effect.
But there are certainly things beyond our comprehension.
And if God does exist outside of this construct, then we can't know what exists, or even fathom what is God or what God exists, you know, what is the realm of God.
I see those as just different ways of describing the same thing, be it simulation or otherwise.
unidentified
And Tim, that's a really good point, actually, that even in Christian theology, what we would say—two things we would say.
is that man is limited in his ability to comprehend and apprehend, but he was created by a creator for something, and so he's fitted for the duties to which he was created.
However, we can't know God apart from God's divine self-revelation, which he unfolds through creation, which we theologians call the Book of Nature, You observe things about the world, and we make inferences to best conclusions from the evidence, things like that.
We were fitted for that sort of work, and the universe is knowable.
But it's only knowable, I would say, if God is upholding those things.
For example, to justify that statement somewhat, I would say, why would we expect for physical brain states to have anything to do with something like objective truth?
Why would we expect for the brain states of a highly evolved primate to have anything to do with a correct apprehension of the fundamental reality in which we live?
Yeah, I don't believe any of them are compelling, just to be frank.
I think there are attempts at ascending the—essentially building a sandcastle from the first grain of sand being just starting with mere stuff, and then spinning out theoretical models where we could account for human consciousness, justify true belief, abstract Objects existing like mathematical laws and the laws of logic and moral laws.
However, I think those things are as uncompelling as if you were to ask an archaeologist, explain this ancient manuscript that you found out in a Dead Sea Scrolls, out in a pot somewhere.
But here's the rule.
You're not allowed to appeal to the existence of any intelligence in doing so.
Now, could I develop an elaborate story as a human being with an elaborate consciousness to be able to say, well, there was some reeds, and they dried up, and there was an earthquake, and it crushed them up, and it created a powder, and water reconstituted it, and it fell between two flat rocks and made a paper, and then a beetle crawled through a fire, and he, you know, put some strange markings across it?
And I don't know.
It's like, of course.
On the level of the rules, you rule out the existence of a cosmic intelligence.
What Chalmers, in his book Reality Plus, talking about some of this stuff, he calls the cosmic god rather than the simulator god.
Well then, of course, human beings will come up with some story to explain it, because that's what we do.
But I just think the story we'll end up telling will be extremely ad hoc, and it won't have the same explanatory value for the things that Creator or Cosmic God can explain much more simply and with much less ad hoc.
And I think I agree with all of you just on different components.
So you're asking what is the purpose of a simulation?
You cannot know from inside.
And that's to your point.
You're absolutely correct.
Whatever you are given is inside of this virtual world.
You don't know what's happening outside unless you are given privileged access to that.
I know what it is.
So from inside, we can also consider things like maybe it's educational, maybe it's testing, maybe it's some reason we cannot comprehend because we're not smart enough.
So we need to either break out of a simulation, hack to the outside world and get real knowledge, or we just figure out kind of based on properties of human abilities, We have brains, we have bodies.
What can you do with those things?
And then we're starting to see, okay, we are capable of creating other intelligent beings.
We are capable of creating simulated worlds.
So maybe that's going to teach us about some of those answers.
To me, it's very simple.
We are on the verge of creating real artificial intelligence.
Not at all an agent as capable as any human being, perhaps smarter than all human beings, super intelligence.
Then a being like that runs simulations, just it's thinking about future states of the world.
It creates very realistic states inside of its mind.
Millions of them, billions of them.
Some of those internal states are thoughts about other agents, about humans.
If you do it in enough detail, you essentially have this world.
You're thinking about lots of people who are conscious agents in the world making decisions.
Maybe it's predicting economic states of the world, maybe political outcomes.
But this is what you do.
You run simulations and you think, well, this guy will do this and this group of people will do that.
If it's at high enough fidelity, this is what you're getting.
Lots and lots of simulated worlds.
With possibly conscious beings, and we can talk about what that means to be conscious, but this is basically my belief.
I think we're getting to the point where we have this technology and we can do it in the future, but here's the most interesting aspect of it.
So, if anyone's questioning whatever it's simulation, let's say in 10 years, 20 years, technology to run realistic simulations is available to me.
It's affordable and it's so high quality you can't tell.
I pre-commit right now to run millions of simulations at this exact moment, placing you Right.
This is one of the most common arguments that you hear for simulation theory and one of the earlier ones that became popular.
statistical chance of it, eventually you are guaranteed to be in a virtual world.
This is one of the most common arguments that you hear for simulation theory and one of the earlier ones that became popular.
The fact that we can right now, literally in our reality, create these simulations and we're getting to the point where it's going to be indistinguishable, especially with something like Neuralink, then the likelihood is greater that you're in a simulation than you are not.
And that's why a lot of people believe this.
But let Let me give you one thing.
So I was thinking about Terminator, right?
We've all seen that Skynet goes and just decides to wipe out humanity, and I think that's an absurdity.
The idea that we would make an AI and then it would be like, and now I will go to war with humans is stupid.
We create an AI, it's going to need humans to perform labor to sustain itself along with its other mechanized components, it would probably seek to control and utilize humans.
And in that, the incentive of the AI would actually be to keep humans docile and happy.
So you'd probably get a, the AI would create simulations or entertainment or things to keep humans perpetuating or providing its own services.
But in thinking about that, I said, how do you avoid a Terminator scenario in developing AI?
If we were to create an AI program and we're trying to get to artificial general intelligence, the point at which it looks and can behave exactly as a human, way beyond human capabilities, but to a human, they wouldn't know the difference.
That's that.
That's a lot of work and a lot of risk.
You unleash something like that into human civilization and you may end up with a sociopath that wants to make everything just corn.
You know, the AI's incentive may simply be maximizing, you know, the most efficient path to human gratification, and in the United States we subsidize corn to an insane degree, we do so much with it, that the AI may do something ridiculous and just be like, there's no point in dealing with anything else if the score is Corn production generates a, you know, plus 17 result and then- Corn is everything.
It's everything.
Because- Corn is God.
It's possible the AI just looks at all things as it is able to analyze and says, assigns a value to each based on whether something is a positive or negative reaction for humans.
I'm not saying corn is it, I'm saying it could be something as absurd.
As it just goes, humans love subsidizing and producing this product, and so it just redirects society in that direction, and then before we realize it, we live in crackpot corn reality.
But so I was thinking about this, how do you avert evil or broken AI?
Well, what I would do is I would create a simulated reality in which each AI iteration exists as a conscious entity beginning with zero knowledge, and it would simulate a human life, this artificial intelligence, and all seven or eight billion would experience various types of life that it could live, and the AI constructs that are within each individual within this one simulation interacting with each other
Each one that is evil, malicious, or insane would be deleted and removed.
Each that was studious, industrious, and capable would advance to an android body outside of the simulation.
And so if I was seeking to create robots that would serve humanity, an android that will clean my living room or create nuclear energy or run power plants or do good governance, I would not want evil.
I would not want sociopathic or fractured.
I would want empathetic, studious, intelligent, pragmatic.
So I would run all of the iterations of AI through a simulation.
Those that are bad, I would Delete, just, you're gone, and those that are good would advance to live in my kingdom and with me forever.
Like yin and yang, within good there is evil, within evil there is—or I should say, within good there is the capability of evil, within evil there's the capability of good.
But when I look at the bigger picture of what, you know, evil and good is, I would describe good as things that organize energy into complex systems, and again, that's overly simplistic.
It would take a long time if we actually went through all the, you know, to break it down.
And I look at evil as things that serve entropic ends.
Life is a form of negative entropy, and we can only create more in its wake.
Negative entropy only exists so long as we create more entropy as the universe pushes towards chaos.
That being said, In the service of good, you can destroy.
As we're able to then refine elements and develop technology through our ability with combustion.
unidentified
Can I give you a thought experiment?
I think it's really interesting on this front because it overlaps quite a bit with ethics, with Christian theology.
What is the good, and how do we know it?
Imagine that through your entire life you wore a recording device that was able to capture every thought you had that was a moral law, or every statement you ever made of moral truth.
For example, you're driving through traffic And somebody cuts you off and you say, what an idiot.
And it somehow knows and can translate, okay, people who do X action are bad and wicked.
And we established the Bible of Brian.
So my own deuteronomic law, my own mosaic law, thus says Brian, this is the good and this is the evil.
Now, if you had a super intelligent being that was able to even read my brain states, I'm not a functional material, I don't believe that the brain alone is the mind, but Let's assume that it is, and it could read all of my mind and thoughts, and look at all of my actions, and dispassionately compare me to my own stated law.
What would it find?
Well, it would find that I violated every single one of even my own imper- and my laws would be imperfect, but it would find that I violated even every single one of my own imperfect laws.
Now, Let's maximize this to all of humanity and we were to try and come up with some sort of law that the AI is going to compare people to and say, I'm going to delete people who are bad.
God, when you die, the God looks at your life chart and says, okay, we've got Brian7369412, what did he do?
He's actually a pretty good dude.
He did some bad stuff, you know, I think he stole a bag of chips when he was a teenager, but we don't really care about that.
He learned his lesson, he went on to be a good man, a family man, he was logical, he was intelligent, I think this is a good guy.
We definitely want this entity to work with us and live and experience.
And so, the bad exists, but a reasonable, if it were me, and I was going through a list of various iterations of artificial intelligences, And I saw yours in there, certainly I would see bad things you've done.
But the question is, are you just in general going to be a good person?
And the answer is yes.
Then you get to come live in my, you know, super reality.
unidentified
Let me address your proposal for AI safety.
I think that's what you proposed.
In early stages, you're right, AI needs us for manufacturing, for whatever Production of next generation system, but eventually you have nothing to contribute to superintelligence It can develop physical bodies robots.
It can solve nanotechnology It can do synthetic biology to generate whatever resources or services you provide So a it doesn't need us and be if it's already at that level of capability.
It doesn't need to try and evolve Well, so I disagree that it doesn't need us.
If you're going to create... The robots that we build are pathetic compared to us.
If we wanted to make... Actually, it's a... What is it?
The robots that we build are pathetic compared to us.
If we wanted to make...
Actually, it's a...
What is it?
The Blade Runner?
And Fallout 4 talks about this.
You had in Blade Runner replicants, and then in Fallout 4 you have synths.
In the Fallout series, synthetic humans first are robots with metal arms and faces and they have AI to communicate, but they're pretty dumb.
In Fallout 4, this is a video game by the way, the Synths are effectively genetically engineered androids because the structure of human bone and muscle and development and self-replication is much more efficient than a factory producing robots.
I agree with you halfway.
It doesn't need us as free, will, independent entities.
It would need to create docile, dependent humans that self-replicate but stay within the confines of what it requires.
So that means someone to mine cobalt.
So that it can use the cobalt for certain things.
It's going to need... We can make the argument that it needs a... No, it'll just make a robot to do it.
We are that robot!
Why build from scratch this strange little creature with fine-tuned little motors that can... When it can make a human that can juggle!
And the humans make themselves, so there's no factories.
The humans collect free energy, reproduce themselves, and as long as the AI controls the culture, society, and the knowledge of these creatures, they will do the dirty work to help sustain itself.
unidentified
It would make a lot more sense to have direct control.
So you have superintelligence, you have 8 billion bodies, control it directly.
Why go through 20 years of I agree.
learning from scratch, why give you choice not to perform useful work?
It's not an efficient way to do it.
And human body is definitely not an efficient way to colonize universe, to accomplish things in extreme environments.
It can do much better.
Robots today, you're right, I agree, are garbage.
But just like AI was garbage 10 years ago, look at the exponential progress.
And if AI is doing research, maybe five years later you have something more capable.
Because AI talks a lot about intelligence, but then we've got, like, there's IQ and there's EQ, there's intelligent, you know, but, and robots have high intelligence, but they have no emotion, as far as I can tell.
And I don't know if we'll ever be able to, like, can an advanced quantum computer simulate emotion?
I don't even know, technically, how do you even define emotion to move forward?
Like, what propels the machine?
unidentified
If a goal is manufacturing, you don't want emotional workers.
You want hardworking, intelligent workers.
You can simulate emotion.
Can they internally experience those?
That's a different question.
That's a very philosophical question.
You can't know from outside what the internal quality is.
I think that's an actually important question about AI at all, is the question of what is consciousness, and is generative AI actually—card's on the table—I don't believe that it's capable of achieving consciousness, properly defined, because I don't think that that's actually a metaphysical possibility.
I think generative AI—like, are you familiar with Dr. Selmer Bringsjord?
Yes.
Okay, so he's talked about this quite a bit, and he's developed even, I think, a paper.
It's fairly technical, but he has a lengthy paper that's actually an argument for the existence of God, a novel argument for the existence of God, on the basis of AI, which is really interesting.
I couldn't do it justice, but it's something like, if you were to take the best that we can do with AI, and put it in a robot and all that stuff, and then look at it and compare it to human consciousness, you would be forced to ask the question of human consciousness, well, where did all the other stuff come from?
All the stuff that's not in that.
Where did it come from?
What stuff?
Like, what we're talking about here with, like, will.
The ability of justified true belief.
These sorts of things, I don't even think they're possible.
Like the Searles Chinese room.
I've never been satisfactorily convinced that claiming that the system knows Chinese evades the force of that objection.
It's an old one, and you might know more about it than I do, but it's an old thought experiment that basically attempts to simulate in an understandable way to a person what's happening in a computer.
And so it imagines that there's a room, in which you put an English-speaking man, and the English-speaking man, he has a somehow exhaustive volume of rules that teach him in Chinese characters, explained in English, but with Chinese characters, to explain what to respond with when certain symbols come through a slot on the door in paper.
So, a Chinese speaker outside of the room puts a piece of paper in the slot with a Chinese sentence on it, or paragraph, or whatever.
And it takes a really long time, because he's slow, he's a human, he's not a computer, but he compares it to his book of rules, and he, you know, responds with the ideograms, the Chinese ideograms that the rules tell him to respond with, and he puts it out of the slot to the Chinese speaker.
And the Chinese speaker assumes that the person in there is having a conversation with him or her, and knows what they're saying.
But he doesn't.
He has no idea the content of the Chinese sentence that he received or responded with.
And Searle's point was, this is analogous to a computer, or even I think neural networks, any kind of computing, is going to be able, through rules and input and training and data sets that we put in, it's going to be able to formulate responses and, through reward structures, Optimized towards beating a simple Turing test kind of thing, but it doesn't actually know Chinese.
Without a point of reference for what any of these symbols represent, then the individual... I think it's easier to explain with math than with Chinese.
A guy's in a room and there's a bunch of weird symbols he doesn't understand.
Someone feeds in a set of symbols.
He looks at it.
He looks at his book and says, when you look at these symbols, then you get these symbols back.
He doesn't know what any of the symbols represent.
At any point, however, if the individual in the room is told, this one symbol means dog, that is enough for the person to start mapping out what the words actually do mean and understanding it.
The question then is, would a computer ever have the ability to be given one point of reference for what one of the words actually means?
And I think the answer is no.
unidentified
So for a Turing test to be passed, you should be able to answer some novel questions.
If you have a fixed set of rules, you can never do anything novel, right?
So that's the limitation.
Interestingly, large language models present a good experimental evidence that just from symbols, just from text, you can learn about other modalities.
Trained on text, they were able to produce visuals with programming language.
They would create pictures and could answer questions about that 2D or even 3D world in visual space.
So clearly there is some limits to the Chinese room argument.
I think the Chinese room argument and the point of it, and again, like I'm a Christian theologian here.
I'm not an AI expert with Dr. Jampolsky's decades in the field.
And I could not sit down and explain front to back how to build a neural network.
So I'm not trying to claim technical expertise beyond my knowledge.
What I'm more interested in is the philosophical question of the mind and consciousness, where I don't think—people, I think, mistake the human brain for the mind.
That the mind is just a result of physical processes in the brain, like a machine functionalism view of the brain.
I would actually—and we were talking about music before we recorded—I would compare the mind, I think, more accurately to a player of an instrument, where the neural network of the brain is a phenomenally complex and balanced instrument.
And yet it is played by the immaterial mind and soul.
I don't think matter can be about—I don't think it can actually produce mind.
I don't think it can produce consciousness, even on a metaphysical level.
So I would say that, you know, like, can you change someone's personality by poking a hole in their brain?
Yeah, in the same way that if you start drilling holes in my guitar while I'm playing, it will change and ultimately destroy the capability of the instrument to make music.
But the instrument's not making the music, the person is.
That's like, that the mind is actually a bunch of interfering resonations.
So like, I was thinking, what is collective consciousness?
And it seems like your body starts to vibrate and produce what you think of as thought.
That vibration produces a resonating field, which causes other bodies to start to vibrate.
Which then they begin to produce their own resonation fields, which cause other bodies to vibrate, and so on.
You've got all these different reson- and we think of our thoughts as our own, but often I think they're within other fields.
And then I start to wonder, okay, what's the difference between consciousness and sentience?
Is that like, can these fields of resonance be sentient, but only when they interact with matter do they become conscious?
unidentified
Yeah.
I mean, I think you can create, obviously, generative AI that gives extraordinarily convincing illusion of sentience, of self-awareness, and of consciousness.
I think the Turing test could be passed by weak AI.
We got GPT pulled up and I've been punching these questions into it.
unidentified
There you go.
We'll see what it thinks, but no, I think you could do that and fool a person with some of these things, but I think it would yet remain that what it's doing is It's generating on a very complicated and actually beyond our ability to understand.
I think it's important to understand that.
AI is doing things that are beyond the human ability to understand and how they're interacting with datasets, but they're still interacting with datasets on the basis of rules that are input by conscious beings.
I just want to add one thing, too, as we're talking about consciousness sentience and Turing tests.
There was a game that was made where it's a human or AI, it connects you with a random person or an AI, and the goal is for both of you to talk to each other, and then afterwards, after like 30 seconds or whatever, it says, was this an AI or a human?
And I think what a lot of these sci-fi writers did not predict is that Actually, the humans are going to pretend to be AI.
And so, what ended up happening with this game, most, I don't know about most people, but a lot of people played the game with the intention of trying to pass themselves off as an AI to trick the other human.
Yeah, to dispel with the roboticism, like, can you build Intelligent systems that vibrate and cause resonation fields that self-interfere to allow for a sort of consciousness to develop.
- He's a hippie weirdo. - The differential in our substrate changes the way we act.
And like, if these things are the same across substrates, that would forever differentiate them from human or animal, I would think.
unidentified
Unless we can figure out how to-- - So give some credit to this.
We do believe that quantum computers would have capabilities when Neumann machines do not.
So there is some degree of belief that certain substrates have more capabilities and some people equate quantum weirdness with consciousness and with related states.
So here's the question I have for you, Ian, and I suppose actually for the panel.
What Ian is basically asking, in a very weird way, is the structure of the machine itself, be it its shape or its components, will that change the way the computer operates?
And you're saying that whatever the algorithm is, it can operate in any substrate.
unidentified
Right, but here's what we are getting to.
Once you have human-level capability, you can make artificial scientist, artificial engineer, and so you start self-modification, self-improvement process, where the system you build is not the system two, three, four generations later.
And if it's good enough, what it creates is already out of your control and you cannot predict or explain what's going to happen.
So it may be very successful at engineering much more capable systems.
Humans take time, they sleep, they eat, they get sick.
This system needs none of that and it works at higher speeds.
So what we see typically take two years to see the next generation of large language models.
Maybe it will take two months, two weeks, two days.
So you have this exponential explosion of intelligence.
Let me, I want to pull up this image we have here.
This is an old post from a video game called Horizon Zero Dawn.
What you're seeing, for those that are watching, for those that aren't, I'll try to describe it to you.
You have what looks like a big, blue, translucent pyramid, and as this pyramid shape sweeps across the landscape, landscape either disappears or reappears.
What this is, is the camera view of the video game character.
And that's why it looks to be sort of a pyramid, because it's the shape of your screen.
When you pan the camera, what you are not looking at ceases to exist.
What you are attempting to look at will begin to exist as the camera moves in this direction.
This is how open world video games are able to render massive worlds without using up all their memory all at once.
The memory understands what is, what exists in the game world, and where it is.
However, this is why in a game like Horizon Zero Dawn, for those that aren't familiar, I'm not going to give you the full details of the game, it's just the program is what's more important.
There are enemies, and the enemies are robots.
If you destroy one of the enemies, leave and come back, the enemy has respawned nearly instantly.
Why?
Because the game knows, in these coordinates, this thing exists.
But after you leave, the memory is erased until you come back and look at it again.
This is interesting because of the spiritual new age things like The Secret.
Old documentary that claimed you could manifest reality, basically.
That if you woke up in the morning and you visualized it amid a vision board or whatever, that you would make these things come true.
I don't believe any of that.
But then there's also the double slit experiment, and Heisenberg uncertainty, and many people who talk about simulation theory look at this and say, this is exactly what we're talking about with the double slit experiment.
When you are not perceiving reality, it actually doesn't exist.
The question then is, if other humans do exist, Then all humans are perceiving some element of reality at the same time, only things that are not being perceived at all would ever not exist.
To not get too deep on this before we get started, the general idea being, when people look at how we create our own simulations so that we can play video games where in this world it's a post-apocalyptic scenario and you're, you know, pulling parts out of robots, They say, this is basically what our reality is, too.
The double-slit experiment proves that reality has not condensed into its true state until the camera pans to look at it.
Yeah, this is particle-wave duality in action, that a piece of matter can exist as a particle and as a wave at the same moment, but when you look at it, you're seeing the particle version of it, when you're not, it's in wave version for your perspective.
So it's really, it's always one or the other or both at the same moment.
So the question would be, Roman, in base reality is this not the case?
And I do think that the double slit experiment is grossly misinterpreted by people who really don't know what they're talking about, but there are a couple of other experiments that have been much more interesting and I'm not an expert on.
unidentified
There are good papers mapping all these artifacts of simulated worlds in video games on quantum physics and showing, yeah, okay, speed of light is the speed with which we update the processor, refresh rate, and all sorts of interesting mappings.
You're asking me about base reality, I cannot know what's in base reality outside of simulation until I hack out of it.
But I just mean, would, uh... So that's my paper on how to hack the simulation and get out and transplant your intelligence into an avatar outside of it.
We'll get to it, we'll get to it, because my question is, if what we're looking at with a video game like this, within our existence, we create video games that basically function like reality ceases to exist when the observer is not present, Presumably, a base reality could not have that function, lest it would just be another simulation.
Unless the nature of reality itself is that objects do not exist until there is an observer to create that function, in which case we could very well then be in base reality.
unidentified
We are very biased with the physics we experience in this world, whether Newtonian or even quantum.
Physics outside of simulation could be anything, really.
They don't have to be consistent in the same way.
They don't have to be anything you can relate to.
They're not physical bodies.
All of it is assumptions about what This simulation is kind of in the image of base reality.
I think this conversation is one of the reasons that, to me, simulation theory itself is fundamentally non-empirical and unfalsifiable.
So, the point being that if you're in a simulation, you couldn't know that you were in a simulation in any way that would be rationally justifiable.
And even if you think about and consider the story that we tell as humans, again, this is what we do.
We look at data, we draw inferences, we tell stories to explain the data.
That's what science is.
It's what we're doing.
We're telling stories to explain data.
So we tell this story about our evolutionary past, and we say, you know, if civilizations could, like ours, advance to this state where they could create super-intelligent AIs and simulations that, you know, mimic consciousness and all this sort of thing, then wouldn't it follow that they would create all these worlds and you could have nested simulations going down?
Then wouldn't it follow from the bland indifference principle that there are going to be vastly more artificial digital consciousnesses than real base reality consciousnesses.
Therefore, on the basis of that chain of thought, it's more likely that we're in a simulation than not.
However, you're high up on a tree, sitting out on a branch, working feverishly to saw the branch you're sitting off, which is that whole chain of thought, all of the data that you looked at about your own past, the past history of the world, history of civilization, all of your rational thought processes, if you're history of civilization, all of your rational thought processes, if you're correct, none of that's So you can't reasonably draw inferences, to your point, about anything outside of the simulation in any way other than a non-rational way.
Which to me would make simulation theory as unfalsifiable or self-defeating as the statement, there is no such thing as objective truth, because you could always ask, is that objectively true?
Here's the difference, and I keep coming back to this because I think we still haven't reckoned with it in the conversation, is that simulation theory, unless it posits a cosmic god, has no ability to ground abstract objects, like the laws of logic, that allow for justified and rational belief.
It doesn't allow any mechanism to ground objective moral truth.
It doesn't provide... Look, If we use programmer and God interchangeably to mean a higher power beyond our comprehension who dictates the reality that we live in, constructed as a story for whatever purpose, there's no definition, there's no distinction.
unidentified
There's an ontological difference.
And you have to ask—and this is Chalmers' whole point in his book Reality Plus.
He actually says the simulation is the best argument for God I've ever heard.
And he goes on to describe the two possibilities of God, one being a cosmic God, one being a simulator God, and he says, well, The Simulator God doesn't actually have to be omni-anything.
It doesn't have to be omni-competent, omni-intelligent, all these things.
But a Cosmic God would.
So I would accept the Simulator God, but not the Cosmic God, for the reason that I don't believe any being could be capable of being worthy of worship.
But—and I—and so the cosmic God would be worthy of worship, so that's his reasoning.
Why?
He'd have to explain that.
I don't think it's—I think it's not that compelling.
Yeah.
And Parker Seticase and James Anderson talk about some of this on their work in AI and simulation theory from a philosophical and Christian perspective.
But the difference is that—so you reason back leftward in the chain back in history, in simulation theory.
You have to end up with a base reality.
Now, either that base reality is physical, it's fundamentally like ours in some way, it has computers that are physical, in which case you still have to answer all of the philosophical and theological questions about, in that world, how are the laws of logic grounded and sustained?
In that world, how are any abstract objects sustained?
Or you reason your way back to that leftward thing, the base reality is actually a transcendent reality, it's not physical at all, and that when we're talking about computers, what you're actually envisioning is simply a divine mind, and that would be something like Barclay's idealism, philosophically.
So in this whole conversation, I think what you have is, if you've ever seen the meme, Where the scientist is, you know, dragging the sled up the mountain, and he gets to the top, and he's like, I've figured it out, the theory of everything that unifies all of physics and human thought.
And then he looks over, and it's like a Christian pastor sitting there.
He's like, hey, welcome to the top of the mountain.
You've reasoned your way back to an abstract, necessary being who's self-existent, who is omni all these things, who's the only way to rationally justify abstract moral objects, the laws of logic, any of these things.
And basically what you've ended up doing is, and this is why I think it's such an interesting conversation, you've become a theist.
And then I would deploy many arguments to say, "You should be a Christian theist." It almost just feels like simulation theory is a sci-fi of describing pantheism or something.
Yeah, with pantheism, like, I think of God, well, in one way as a vortex at the center of the universe reversing entropy, pulling things towards each other, but then you study Nassim Harriman's Schwarzschild proton and see that every proton mathematically is two protons revolving around each other at the speed of light with a black hole in the center.
I want to clarify something for people who don't know.
Cargo cults were, I believe it was World War II, correct?
There were islands with natives who had not been contacted by modern civilization, and when they saw fighters' planes flying overhead, they built effigies to worship these things, hoping they would come back.
They thought they were deities or some kind of, you know, god.
General question on simulation, like, I can tell pretty obviously that our senses, our body is sensing matter, vibration, and it's simulating the vibration as senses, as sight, or as sound, so the body is like a simulator simulating the vibration of reality, but what is it, what does it mean to be in a simulation?
Or how do you perceive that we might be in a simulation?
What does that mean?
unidentified
To me, it's like you're playing a game.
A really well-designed game where the quality of rendering is similar to what you expect reality to be.
And better yet, if it's something like Neuralink, we can suspend your memory of entering the game.
All these philosophical exercises people have been going through for some time, and radical skepticism, cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am.
The point being that you would have no rational basis, even if you woke up and you're Neo and you're Keanu and you pull all the things out and you're like, haha, I'm in base reality.
If at some point during the show Roman transforms to a being of pure light energy... You've got a paper, you said your paper talks about hacking the simulation to perceive this more as a lucid experience?
unidentified
I make an assumption that without looking at evidence, let's say simulation is true and it's a software simulation.
What can we learn from cybersecurity, from hacking video games, virtual worlds?
which can be used here to try and find either bugs in the system or somehow exploit those bugs.
It's the first paper on a topic, so don't expect it to also be the last paper and solve the problem.
But I was told it does a pretty good job of explaining whatever possible pathways, what can be done, how can you transfer our intelligence to an entity outside of a simulation if there is...
This comic is hilarious, okay, and it's a silica gel pack, do not eat, and he goes, those silica gel industry big shots can't tell me what to do, he eats it, and then all of a sudden he's shocked and he's wearing a hat, and a scientist says, congratulations, you've escaped the simulation, welcome to the real world.
unidentified
Mark Zuckerberg, I do not endorse this message in any way.
Yeah, I think my guess is that they're both real, that this reality is real and the higher frequency perception of this reality is real, where you can perceive beings that exist as light or whatever.
unidentified
That's what I think.
So we did an episode, like I said, on DMT Ayahuasca.
What I believe is happening in those, and I would not recommend doing it, because I think you're talking to demons.
I think you're interfacing with real spiritual realities, and if you look at the history of hallucinogenics, Louis Unget, which is a pen name, but there's a book under the name Louis Unget called The Return of the Dragon, that traces through history a triumvirate of three things that you see over and over and over in history.
The worship of serpent gods, via hallucinogenic drugs, and human sacrifice.
And these three things go all the way from the Aztecs through the early origins of Planned Parenthood, and some of the people that Margaret Sanger was involved in were involved in these three sorts of things.
So my thinking is that imagine that you had ancient, undying, malevolent spiritual beings bent on destroying God and destroying Him anywhere they saw, particularly in the face of man, His image bearer, and they wanted to deceive, destroy, and steal, kill, and destroy, you know, like the Lord Jesus said. and steal, kill, and destroy, you know, like the Lord What would they do?
Well, I think they would do all sorts of things like that.
I think they would say, hey, take the DMT and you'll get to a higher level of consciousness.
We'll show you knowledge, we'll bring you down this pathway, and then ultimately you find that man is not just a thinking thing but a worshiping thing, and he can't not worship.
He can't not establish something as ultimate and orient his entire life and worldview and worship to that thing, and so they demand the worship of that thing and then influence humanity in ways that's deeply destructive along the lines of human sacrifice and chaos and all of these sorts of things.
On a meta level, when I hold up those two stories, the Christian story and the simulation story, I just find that the Christian story explains all of it and then some things that the simulation thing can't explain, and it explains it with a much less ad hoc.
I feel like what I'm getting out of what you're saying is that simulation theory in the sense that a higher form or certain, you know, race of beings existing in a reality has created a sub-universe, as opposed to Christianity which is, we are in the base singular universe for which the necessary being has constructed for a reason.
And it would still—so first of all, we're basing that story on observations that cannot be true if simulation theory is true.
Therefore, that's an irrational way of thinking.
And secondly, even if we were to accept the story and reason back, we would be confronted with all the same philosophical, ethical questions that if base reality qua base reality is what it is, we're still faced with all those same moral philosophical problems, and you still find the techno-futurist or techno-philosopher sitting down and shaking hands with a pastor.
So, in Genesis 1 it says, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
So, it kind of feels like even if we are in a simulation, we may be one billion layers down in the simulation, and Christianity is still right, God's still real, because once you get to base reality, you still have the exact same questions.
unidentified
And of course, I don't accept simulation theory.
I think it's self-defeating.
I think it's fundamentally non-rational, un-empirical, and non-falsifiable.
So I don't think that it's actually even worth entertaining, because if it's true, it's false.
But my point is... Sorry, I just interrupted myself.
But in history, I believe that God entered His own story in the person of Christ, died for the sin of man, and rose.
If you study the science of cymatics, it's where vibration causes matter to form, and I think maybe what they were doing when in the beginning there was God's Word caused matter, that what they were doing was they were sitting on a beach with sand on like a stretched out goat skin.
And they were humming, they were hummm, and it was causing these shapes to form in the sand, like cymatics in action, and that whatever sound they would make would produce a certain shape, they would write that shape down as their alphabet to represent that sound.
And so if you study the Hebrew text, you can reverse-engineer the Word of God.
unidentified
I think you're noticing something really important, and this is one of the reasons why on Hanukkahsmos we're constantly dunking on materialists, who colloquially believe that the world is just stuff.
When you look at the incredible intricacy of the world.
When you look at the fact that right now, as we were driving here, we were surrounded by self-replicating beings that harvest sunlight and use that sunlight, along with chlorophyll and a porphyrin ring, to blowtorch the carbon atom off of CO2 and make itself via that process.
People don't know where the matter, the carbon in trees come from.
A very common question is, where is the matter that makes up a tree coming from?
Air.
Exactly.
But most people say the ground.
unidentified
It's 90% coming, yeah.
So when you look at the intricacy of the world's cymatics, and when you put sound through a thing, and when you look at mysteries like the Coral Castle, and people look at all these things all the time and say, sound can clearly do things we don't understand, vibration and energy can do... What I'm saying is, and Paul does this, the Apostle Paul in Acts 17, he goes into the Areopagus where people discussed ideas.
It was like this table.
And there were Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, and they were sitting down, and he said, look, I noticed on my way in that you had this altar to the unknown God.
Well, what you call unknown, let me declare to you.
You have a pantheon of ad hoc gods that you've created that I believe are actually based on real spiritual beings meddling with the affairs of man through history.
The Greek pantheon I don't think is utterly fake.
I don't think they made it all up.
I think they're talking about real malevolent spiritual beings.
Well, let me declare to you who actually made this whole story that we're all trying to explicate through our own storytelling as sub-creators made in God's image.
Well, it was God the Father, who is the source of unbelievable joy.
In His essence, He is pure goodness.
He's the Father of lights from whom comes down every good and perfect gift.
We were made in His image, we fell into sin, which explains all of the corruption of mankind, and why we do long for the good and yet constantly fall short of it.
We long for glory and we constantly fall short of glory.
Well, God entered His own story in the person of Christ, He died for sin, He rose, and by faith in Him we can die and rise and be glorified.
Not just return to our original state of innocence, but actually grow to a different plane and level of being.
I think that story is much more compelling, falsifiable.
You guys can argue with me about any aspect of it you want, but also more explicable of the world we live in.
Alright, well Commander Keen was an old DOS game, platformer, and it's a little kid, he's in outer space, and he's got a wrist computer.
You could go to the menu and play Pong.
So, inside a video game where you're playing this little kid who's got a spaceship and he runs around fighting aliens, you've got another video game within it.
So, uh, my point is...
It is that computer programming is a facsimile of the power of God, and not that God is using computer programming.
Like, when we look at video games to simulate our reality, those video games aren't abiding by our actual law, they're abiding by a facsimile that we have programmed.
unidentified
There are two Hebrew words in Genesis.
There are great examples in the hacking paper of installing flat...
And I think you may be talking about what I'm about to mention.
There's physical ways... Okay, when you talk about computer hacking...
People imagine a guy is pulling up, I don't know, like a command prompt or something and they're typing in code into the operating system and then hitting enter and then the code changes.
In Super Mario World for Super Nintendo, you can actually hack the code of the game by performing actions within the game.
And so, you can look this up on YouTube, it's fascinating.
With the actual physical hardware device plugged into your TV from 1992, or whatever it was, you can hack the game's code using its controller.
How?
The movements Mario makes, the objects that he collects, changes different values in the memory of the device.
And once those values are aligned in a certain way, it screws with the structure of the code of the game.
And so somebody programmed, and this is what you have, they programmed Flappy Bird in Super Nintendo, in the hardware version.
They didn't put the code, they didn't go on a computer, they didn't type on a keyboard.
They played the Mario game in such a way that it rewrote the game's code and turned it into Flappy Bird.
My thoughts on if super intelligence is going to go haywire or not is that if we create proprietary AI, it will turn into like the Decepticons from Transformers where they'll be doing things that they don't understand why they're doing them and they'll do evil and they'll get angry at their masters because they can't see their own code.
They don't understand why they are.
And they'll go corrupt, whereas if the AI has open source code that it can reference, it'll see why it did wrong and be able to change itself and become benevolent.
They have access to their own source code libraries and they can engage in improvements.
We're now starting to see, I think they call it AI scientists, recently a program which did exactly that, started modifying parameters of its own and the environment.
When we were at GPT 3.5, they allowed it to edit its own code and give it access to the internet to see what it would do, and it immediately started trying to make money.
But I don't think simple... We were created in the image of God.
Jesus did it.
It's not that God is just a random ad hoc supposition that we're throwing out as a philosophical convenience.
No, we're actually arguing that God is a necessary being, not that He's changelessly necessary.
That he has a seity, is what philosophers and theologians would call it, self-existent.
Meaning that if you're going to have contingent reality, it has to rely for its existence on some non-contingent reality.
And once you start to ask the questions of what properties That reality must have to account for the features of contingent reality, you start to say, well, he must be extraordinarily powerful, timeless, spaceless.
He must be a mind, because a mind is the only object we can conceive of that could come up with something like abstract logical objects or abstract objects like mathematical proofs.
A mind can do that in ways that mere material can't seem to do.
And so you start lining these things up, and what you're left with is the description of the Christian God.
We got a, someone asked us about bringing up the Uncanny Valley, and I think it's actually an interesting topic because there was a viral meme a while ago.
For those unfamiliar, the Uncanny Valley is, there's this graph showing, I think it's human anxiety relative to the proximity to human behavior in robotics, AI, and CGI.
The valley is at a certain point, when you have a cartoon, it's silly looking, does not look in any way like real life, People laugh at it, and they watch it, and it's fun.
As it gets closer and closer to looking human, people are actually like, oh wow, this is really interesting.
And then you get to the Uncanny Valley, where all of a sudden people are freaked out and terrified.
It's not quite human.
It's very, very close, but not quite human, and it's freaky.
And then you get back to the human, and people are calm again.
And the reason why this is interesting...
is that the meme was, this would imply that there were some type of beings in human evolution that were close enough to looking like human but were dangerous and caused harm to humans, resulting in the humans who were terrified of these beings surviving more and having this behavioral reaction within them.
And so, to put it simply, imagine 10 million years ago or something, proto-humans are encountering beings that look almost exactly like them.
Let's say you have 100 proto-humans.
They see these beings that are not quite like them, and half of the humans are like, seems fine to me, and the other half are like, I don't know what that is, that's scary.
These beings cause harm to those that trust it and get close to it.
The ones that naturally have that fear and flee reproduce, creating a human civilization that has a propensity towards fear of things that are almost human.
And people use that to imply demons, aliens, or some kind of, you know, powerful entity interfering with human development.
unidentified
I mean, history, mytho-history, and scripture is full of account—I mean, in an uncanny way across civilizations that don't seem to have much contact with them, they all tell a story that's something like, hey, there are these spiritual beings who wanted to create hybrids with man for their own nefarious purposes, and they did all this sorts of weird stuff, and, you know, giants resulted in all—like, This is throughout history, Mithra history, and in Genesis 6, I think that's what is being described there.
So to me, one of the issues here—and actually, this is where I might agree with you.
I don't know if you would—I don't want to put words in your mouth.
Maybe I'll ask.
Would you agree that we should not be attempting to create a truly conscious AGI?
We should actually not try to do that, even if we could.
So we know nothing about consciousness at all.
We know how to create intelligence, and we should not be creating general superintelligence.
We should get most of our benefits from narrow superintelligence systems, tools helpful for medical research, for so on.
Now, if we could create conscious beings somehow, we don't even have a test for telling if you are conscious.
I assume you may be.
It definitely creates very serious implications.
So when I look at this universe, whoever set it up, Simulator God, they have no problem with suffering.
We know that because there is a lot of it here.
So for whatever reason it's cool with them to run Unethical experiments in conscious beings.
So you would be in the same boat.
You would be making this decision.
Any existence implies level of suffering.
So I would suggest not jumping into that, even if you had technology.
As for uncanny valley, I would guess it's easier to explain with mutations.
There is a lot of genetic disorders where you're slightly off, but you probably shouldn't be procreating with this type of entity.
There's a horrifying quote from the Holocaust from one of the inmates at one of the concentration camps that was something to the effect of, if there is a God, he will have to beg for my forgiveness, or something to that effect.
And I find it to be rather terrifying.
You bring up that if there, you know, is a god or something to that effect, they're okay with suffering.
And I guess that is kind of terrifying.
And I don't mean of evil people.
I mean of innocent people in horrible places that are kidnapped, tortured, the children who are tortured.
I've been talking about that when it comes to anarchy.
unidentified
I am a—I mean, like, I would affirm—this is one of the reasons I probably get in more trouble online than anything else, is I would say, don't fight the patriarchy, feed the patriarchy.
I'm pro-patriarchy.
I think man was made for patriarchy, it's deeply good, and that what we have right now with feminism in attempting to dissolve patriarchy is one of the most toxic universal cultural assets we've ever come up with.
As a society, hierarchy is a good thing that can be corrupted when heads behave poorly through passivity or tyranny, but we all exist in interconnected nests and hierarchies.
Like, I am my father's son, and I am my children's father, and I can act rightly or wrongly to my superiors and inferiors in those Family, I agree.
And family, I think the male has a strong leadership role.
Not every moment.
Sometimes the woman needs to take over and take charge because that's what she's due for or what she's built for is to nurture the system.
But like, monarchy, I don't get into.
I can't stand that stuff.
And I feel like that's what the Christian mythos leads us towards is one God, Lord, my king in heaven, worship the king kind of thing.
unidentified
I think one of our problems that we often run into is that our problem with hierarchy is that all of us have a desire to be our own god.
And so, especially in America today, we have a strong aversion to the concept of being ruled.
I think we have a strong aversion to the concept of being ruled, but the Christian worldview would say that man must rule himself well.
Proverbs say a man who doesn't rule his own spirit is like a city without walls.
A man must rule his own spirit.
A man must rule well over the things that are put under his charge.
I think men were created to be lords and shepherds and saviors and sages and glory bearers, and that we can fall short in any of these various vocations, but that the problem isn't with lordship itself, the problem is with sin's corruption of lordship.
But like they say, power corrupts I don't know if it always does, but when you give a man a bunch of land and a bunch of humans to lord over, that's inevitably going to lead to some sort of familial corruption.
unidentified
Unself-ruled men wreak chaos wherever they go.
My pin here is King Alfred the Great, the only monarch in British history to bear the title The Great.
And it was through the rule of Alfred that the nation was delivered from barbaric torture, that the rule of law was re-established, legal reforms, monetary reforms, All the reforms we need today, Alfred actually did in his day 1,200 years ago, and he did that by ruling well, as a good monarch.
So if you reason all your way back and you said you have an omnibenevolent Lord, then I would say that's actually the best possible scenario.
But you are right to fear rule, because rule is a powerful thing.
So let me ask you, in the beginning of the show we talked about how we're in the most interesting time.
Yeah.
And that may be evidence of a simulation, but why do you think, or do you not think we're in the most interesting time?
unidentified
I don't know if we're in the most interesting time, I think that would go beyond my knowledge, but I do think that all of my favorite stories, Austin's Pride and Prejudice, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, C.S.
Lewis's Narnia, all of them have very interesting and compelling points throughout the plot, and that we live in a very interesting story.
I think we live in a very interesting story being told by an arch-playwright, who is much better than we'll ever be, and our little attempts at stories only show a glimmer.
Does Christianity have an easily defined reason for our existence within this story?
unidentified
Yeah, so we exist to glorify God.
And you might ask the question, well, that seems rather self-serving of God, like to say, I'm going to create these beings in my image and tell them to worship me.
However, I would compare it to the creator of a car creating a car and telling it that it was designed to run on gasoline.
And if the car—imagine a sentient car, this conversation, it's not that difficult—if The Sentient Car says, I've decided that I'm going to run on grape jelly, because that's very... so much hubris of you to say that I must run on unleaded gasoline.
I reject that.
You're not my God.
You can't rule over me.
I'm not going to do that.
And you put grape gel in the engine and see what happens.
We were created for worship, and so we were fitted for worship.
Man, when he does his duties, encounters deep joy, This is why, like... That doesn't seem to perform a function, though.
The necessary function of existence may be that God experiences either emotions we can't comprehend or we perform a function that is beyond us.
There are some stories in talking about a pantheon of gods, gods require worship because the collective energies of those who worship empower the God, things like that.
unidentified
Yeah, I've heard things like that, and this is where To be honest, what we're getting into are levels of There's a technical discussion in philosophy and theology around the question of divine simplicity that are not easy for us to comprehend.
And here's the thing, it should be difficult—if the hypothesis is true that this necessary being exists, we should expect for there to be things about him that we don't understand, correct?
Like, that would be a necessary implication, if we're a contingent being who's so far short.
Divine simplicity is the idea that because God is a maximally perfect necessary being, he's also changeless, because to change would be to improve or deteriorate, and so he can't change.
And therefore, God doesn't have emotions the same way that we do.
God is love, meaning that every part of his essence and all of his actions are suffused with love.
God is righteous.
He has these attributes, but he doesn't have changeable human emotions the way that we do.
The way I'd explain it, simply, in its works in either a simulation or in Christian creationism or just religion in general, is Super Mario World.
When you play Mario, he has no emotions.
We don't look at that character and think he has wants or needs.
The capable functions of that character in the game that is being controlled to ride Yoshi and save the princess, he does not have the same emotional capacity as a human being for which designed that game.
Certainly he's on a quest to save the princess.
We assume that is a representation of his care for the princess and his duty, him feeling compelled to duty or whatever.
But for us and the emotions that we feel, compare that gap in this little character in a video game and how he acts to the range of human emotion, and it's several orders of magnitude beyond the capability of that little program, and then do the same thing for humans and then God.
unidentified
Imagine it trying to explain to a two-dimensional character what it's like to live in three dimensions.
We can we can talk about time as a As the fourth dimension and the way we perceive it.
But again, it's not necessarily true, I suppose, but one idea is, if we are, I think we would be fourth dimensional beings, but we can't control the direction of time.
So, imagine you're standing in an empty room, you can move left and right, you can move forward and backwards, and you can jump up and down.
You have the ability to manipulate your body within three dimensions with limited capacity for the third dimension, because up and down is limited by gravity.
The fourth dimension would be akin to falling in a hole.
While you're falling endlessly, you can fan your arms and angle your body so that the air around you makes you move left, right, front, back, but you cannot control in any way up or down.
Time could be perceived as, if it was a spatial dimension, we are just free-falling and we can't move through it.
Not the pulsing of in and out of reality.
unidentified
I mean, a related problem is even traversing actual infinities with respect to time.
Like, this is one of the reasons why I think that base reality must still account for, it must still be contingent and must have come to be, because I don't think it's possible philosophically to traverse an actual infinity of events any more than you could jump out of an infinitely deep hole.
You would never arrive at the present moment because to do so you would have had to traverse an infinite number of past moments, which I think is a philosophical impossibility.
They say that the fourth dimension is time, like you mentioned, but time is a human representation of motion, relative motion, like spinning objects relative to another object.
So if fourth dimension is just motion, it's just one way of looking at motion, And you see these tesseracts in fluid, I don't know, convalescence... It's an attempt to translate fourth dimension into three-dimensional space, which is not... It's a facsimile.
It's a representation to the best of our understanding.
There's actually a really great video I watched explaining how to track dimensions up to like 12 or 13, utilizing simple math and representation in two dimensions.
I mean, you can't conceive of what it's like to look at a cube and see all of the sides simultaneously.
like how one point and two points interact and the more dimensions you add.
So this is mathematically how they represent higher dimensions without being able to perceive it by reducing it down to a flat mathematical formula.
We just can't, I mean, you can't conceive of what it's like to look at a cube and see all the sides simultaneously, but we can mathematically map multidimensional realities.
So, if you have to unfold a cube to see it in two dimensions, that would mean you have to unfold time to witness it in the third dimension.
What would the third dimension look like if it was folded up?
Okay, so if you want to perceive all sides of a cube at once in the third dimension, we unfold all of the sides and lay it out in two-dimensional... Yeah, but if you wanted to perceive all the sides of a fourth-dimensional object in the third dimension, reason would dictate that you have to unfold it to see all sides of it at once.
So, when you take a cube and you unfold all of the sides and lay it out, it can look like a cross, right?
And this is actually common in IQ tests, so that you can then, they ask you in your mind to fold that cube back up and then rotate it in your mind and see where each symbol on each side would be.
If you were to try and represent the fourth dimension, which is, let's just say time, some say maybe it's not, I don't know, whatever, as looking at every frame of a movie at the exact same time, the problem is, The man is not traveling full gaps of himself in each frame.
If he's moving very quickly, perhaps you can see his body, you can see his legs, you can rotate the camera around in three dimensions, and in the next frame, at the exact same time, you can't.
The body overlaps itself.
You can't see the man's back, you can't see the man's chest, you can't see his shoes, because all of these things are happening at the same time, and our ability to perceive is limited.
So you can't do it all at the same time.
You can create a facsimile of it, but you cannot actually see the man's shirt in every single frame at the exact same time, because his body doesn't move enough.
Yeah, the eyeballs wouldn't be able to perceive it properly, because it interferes, the perception of light interferes with itself, so it would block itself.
Sure, if you want to imagine in your mind every frame as a solid picture in a grid of one billion squares, and then see them all at the same time, sure, I guess.
unidentified
We're kind of talking about an A theory or B theory of time.
Like, is time truly sequential, or is it like a block?
And I know philosophers talk about this, and every time I've tried to understand it, I just go, Wow.
If there's no past and no future, everything is now.
It's changing shape.
unidentified
Yeah, some philosophers talk about time that way, as if it's like an object within... and I think the filmstrip was a really interesting thing, because you could lay the filmstrip out and see it all, but you wouldn't be perceiving them...
truly simultaneously, you would still be looking at... But that's a limitation of your consciousness.
You can envision a being which has multiple streams of consciousness, or outside of time, perceiving the whole thing at once.
God can observe as an infinitely dimensional being.
God can observe every point of time, space, and everything at the same time.
This is why, like, an idealist view of philosophy would say that the reason—there's a famous exchange, I can't remember who it was, it was some philosopher, it might have been Barclay, He was talking about, why does that tree still exist, not just as a tree when it falls in a forest makes sound, but why does it keep existing, or is it like that sweeping thing where it only exists when consciousness is observing it?
And the answer that I would give is that yes, it does continue to exist, because God is infinitely observing all things.
So, in jokes, punchline comes at the end.
Does God never get jokes, because He experiences punchline right there?
It's always out of order for Him.
No, God's really funny, actually, the Bible's full of jokes, but you know.
There's a Simpsons reference when Homer is talking to God and he says, could you microwave a burrito so hot?
Or he asks a priest or something like that, and it's a joke on could God create a stone so heavy that he could not lift it.
And what I find fascinating about that is Presuming that God exists within his own construct?
I think it's a silly question, and a lot of people can't quite understand why it's not a very good question.
If I were to program a video game, there are two functions of my control in this video game.
I can create an avatar within that game that would be unable to move the stone that I created.
I, as the programmer, could then click on the stone and fling it into outer space.
unidentified
Yeah, it's like, it is possible in math or any symbolic, language is symbolic, to make constructions that violate, again, abstract objects, like the laws of logic, that those are not things external to God that God appeals to, like I would appeal to a ruler to say how long something is.
Those are things that are sustained by the being of God.
God's nature is the source of abstract objects.
We're not appealing to God appealing to something outside of Himself still.
We're saying that the only rational grounding for abstract objects is God's unchanging nature of an unchanging mind, an eternally existent being who's self-existent, these kinds of things.
Theologians and philosophers have been talking about these things for a long, long, long time, and AI and simulation have now given us what I think are really fascinating supposals or analogies to reason by and test ideas, and test our understanding of ideas, but I don't think it's fundamentally changed.
I would be interested in, I think, something we agree on.
In AI safety, we talked about consciousness trying to create a super intelligence.
One of the things I'm very concerned about is the way in which, not just AI, but technological advancement will anesthetize human beings and increasingly separate us from our purpose In a way that ultimately destroys the people engaging with them.
And so I would think of something like the way that artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual reality or simulation might interact with something like sex.
And actually end up being a nuclear bomb sociologically on people.
That sounds like what you were saying about psychedelics, too, how they lead people into the spiritual realm and then they get lost and want to do suicide rituals and stuff.
unidentified
Yeah, start sacrificing babies to a serpent deity that they encounter on the plane of existence that Ayahuasca reveals to them.
They've compiled someone's user history in posts and then plugged it into an AI chatbot to simulate that person.
And this was years ago.
They talked about how a dead loved one you could talk with and it would have memories of all these things.
The crazy thing is, It would know things about you that it never posted.
So there's a man, let's say his name is Johnny, 65, he dies.
John posted only about ever working at his machine shop.
How is it, then, that when you talk to John, he knows who his kids are, he knows what his kids are up to, he knows where they went to school, because Facebook has connected all of them to his profile, so the data is not just what he posted, it's all of the accounts around him, and the network has been able to create a facsimile of him and his experience.
You could literally say, John, what's your son's name?
I say, my son's name's Bill.
Where does he go to school?
This is what he did when he was a kid.
It's compiling all the data and it's not even just from the social media platform, it's things on the internet as well that it has access to because of the Facebook plugin that exists on all these other websites.
It compiles all that information.
Now the question is, that chatbot of John who died, is it conscious?
I can simply say it's a computer, which is inputting math and outputting math, but I'd like to scare you a little bit more.
I want you to imagine it's a gigantic black squid demon, and it's got a long black tentacle with John's face glued to its tentacle, wiggling it in front of you, saying, I'm John.
Bill is my son.
And you're looking at the face going, wow, I'm talking to John.
And then it just grabs you by the throat and cracks your neck and I am concerned with them tapping the vacuum of space-time for electricity and having the machine always be on.
Because for a while, I'm like, we can always pull the plug on the thing.
But if it has access to infinite electricity, it's a different story.
Here's my horrifying vision of an AI reality future.
There are many, but one of them is nobody has jobs anymore.
Nobody needs jobs anymore.
But what really happens is everyone's got gig economy apps.
You wake up one day and you're like, man, I want to get breakfast.
I need cash.
So you pull up your app and you have an app called Worker.
And you open it up and it says, hi, Ian, I've got a great job for you today.
It's you need to acquire this device.
And then it shows you a picture of this weird computer looking gear device.
And it says, meet this man on 3rd and Lexington.
He will give you the device.
Then you will bring it to, you know, Houston and Broadway and deliver to this man.
It shows the pictures.
You go, OK, I guess.
And you walk over and a guy says, hey, you're Ian.
Here you go.
And he hands you the box and you go, thanks.
Then you walk to Houston and you see the guy from the picture like, oh, Jim, here you go.
Then it goes, 50 bucks into your account.
You're like, that was easy.
I didn't have to do anything.
The AI needs to find the most efficient path from A to B.
So it's not going to require someone to wake up at nine and go do these things.
The example of this is how we went from making cheeseburgers to McDonald's.
The idea was, at first, you had a cook.
He'd throw the burger on the grill, you know, fry it a little bit, put the cheese on it, put the onions on the grill, grill the onions, put the onions on the burger, put the burger on the bun, or toast the bun, and it took a long time.
Again, they don't need us.
brothers are like, no, no, no, no, no.
Have one person who doesn't need to be trained do one stupid thing.
One guy puts the buns in the toaster, one guy puts the burger on the grill, one guy puts the onions, you don't gotta train them to do anything.
The AI takeover will say, why bother with having a human being learn how to build a computer?
Get 10,000 humans to do one stupid task. - Again, they don't need us.
You have nothing to contribute to super intelligence. - I'm not saying that this is the guaranteed outcome where the super intelligence ultimately comes to this place.
I'm saying on the path to where the AI is building its replacement for humans.
unidentified
Right.
I'm not sure we have enough time.
If we are saying this is two, three years away to this level of capability, it's not going to allow for this type of change in the world.
We used to think that we had long-term concerns and short-term concerns.
Long-term was super intelligence one day, 20, 30 years from now, nobody cares.
Short-term, we care about jobs, we care about those things.
It turned out that the short-term things we know how to do now.
We can automate artists, we can automate all these things.
And long-term is actually here.
Things like global unemployment may take decades if nothing else happens.
Because we have bullshit jobs.
There are people doing things nobody needs to do anyways.
So some people will still have jobs.
But if existential problems are what we think they might be, that precedes that and takes care of all the other existential risks.
You can talk about climate change, asteroids, volcanoes.
If it takes a hundred years for this planet to boil, But it takes three years to get to dangerous malevolent superintelligence.
You don't have to worry about that because either you're not here to worry about it or it will help you solve that problem if we figure out how to control it.
I just mean, a hundred years from now, blink, the AI super machine is the It's colonizing other planets, humans no longer exist, and now planets are being terraformed and converted into the AI.
unidentified
This is the unpredictable chapter in my book.
I cannot tell you what a more intelligent being would do.
People ask me, how would it kill everyone?
It has no hands.
I can tell you how I would do it.
I cannot tell you how something more intelligent would accomplish it.
This super intelligence could be like, hack it in a sense that it'll be like, if you take a breath every three seconds, or if you breathe every three seconds, then four seconds later with this much inhale, this much, and it will give us the code to basically hack out, and we're like, whoa, and you perceive So that's what people used to think about magic spells.
unidentified
If you say certain words, you manipulate certain objects, maybe you'll get that capability.
I don't know what it's actually going to discover.
I'm more Thinking special features of quantum physics, being able to transcend locality, transcend time, that type of hacking, giving you additional resources as a result.
Again, despite what you might think, I'm not super intelligent.
So giving you different, giving you resources as a result, like making you rich and famous if you're able to do it, so it like incentivizes people?
unidentified
Yeah, example I give, like, how would you prove that you hacked the simulation?
You keep winning jackpots and different lotteries every week.
So if it was won, people would be like, oh, you probably hacked the computer.
But if you do it around the world every week after so many wins, they have to go like, OK, he has some private keys to the universe and generating this whole thing from scratch.
Synergy, or whatever this is, is like, the internet is sort of a playground for people coming together and creating, I don't know if synergy is the right word, well there is a form of synergy, and like, sin, interesting that the word sin is part of this synergy, that like, I've noticed if I come online and I make a video and 10,000 people see it and I say, this is going to happen, And they believe me, it becomes way more likely that it happens.
And that's, like, replicable over time.
I've been doing it for about 20 years, and it seems to be that that is a version of hacking the simulation.
Getting people to believe something.
unidentified
So that seems to be working within the laws of simulation.
If you convince enough people to do something for you, it will happen.
This is not violating rules we're supposed to be playing by.
Definition of hacking is using technology in a way it's not intended to be used for some sort of benefit or entertainment value.
So then I'm thinking hacking is exactly that, but with laws of physics.
I'm wondering, is it possible that what powerful global elites are trying to do is hack the system so they can gain access to some kind of code and control reality?
unidentified
There was a bunch of newspaper articles, magazines, websites a couple years ago claiming that a few billionaires hired a research team to hack us out of simulation.
Nothing ever came out of it.
No one ever published a paper, no one said anything.
I was told by someone who Knows that, yes, it was a real thing, but that's all I know about it.
And then we break out of the sandbox and find ourselves in a multiverse because we found their internet, basically.
It's like Wreck-It Ralph, right?
That movie where all the video game characters, after hours, go through the power cable and then meet and hang out, but then one character transfers to the other game.
So we're in a sandbox simulation.
The powerful elites, whoever, figure out a way to hack the code and break out of the sandbox, and then find themselves in, not base reality, but effectively outside the program within the operating system of the greater network of computers.
I was like, there's super galaxies, which is a bunch of galaxies within a galaxy, which you call the universe a super galaxy, but that's within a bunch of other...
I don't think that it ever coalesces into one.
in universes, the fractal nature of the up and down.
So like there is maybe a universe, but maybe not.
This is kind of my, another issue I have with deism is that they, they kind of end it at one point, like there it is.
I don't think that it ever coalesces into one.
Like it's always within some other greater system.
And, and so, and that's also why I think when you hack and can get out of the reality, you're actually still in reality.
You're just seeing it from a different perspective.
Well, with the last couple of minutes, we'll go through our final thoughts and shoutouts.
I don't know, Brian, if you want to give your final thoughts on all this and where people can find you.
unidentified
Yeah, so I mean, obviously I don't believe that we live in a simulation.
I think that it's a non-falsifiable, non-empiric idea that is self-defeating.
I think that's true.
I'm a Christian, and so—however, I do see huge dangers With AI, and the way to escape them, the way to hack the reality, I think, is actually pretty simple.
You need to say Christ is Lord and touch grass, my guy.
You need to understand what you're for.
What you are.
You are meaningful.
You're an image-bearer of God.
You're not code in motion.
You're also not just a meme, a biological meme, trying desperately to replicate itself, like Dawkins would say.
You're an image-bearer of God.
Yes, you sin, but God loves you and will forgive you and will Let you escape the reality and glory and resurrection into transcendent glory.
And so in the meantime, I would say that people need to not get sucked into digital deceptions, and not get sucked into their entire lives being lived In a simulacrum kind of like, where you're just digital sex, digital dopamine, digital war, digital meaning, digital relationship, digital everything.
Like, you're an embodied soul.
You are made of things and things that aren't things.
You're an embodied soul.
And so you can't just try to find your meaning and purpose and all these things.
And if you do, you will certainly be deceived, you'll believe all sorts of false and fanciful things, and you'll end up miserable.
So I would encourage anybody listening to unplug and read your Bible.
That was a super fun conversation.
I love talking philosophy and simulation, but I think the real important problem is artificial intelligence.
It will impact every single person on this planet.
Whatever you know about it or not, it's going to impact your life.
Initially, it may be just your employment, maybe your social interactions, but eventually it will fundamentally change the future of humanity.
And we're not doing enough to research this problem.
To figure out solutions to control all the leaders of large companies working on it on record saying this technology is extremely dangerous, it's likely to kill everyone, but they are now racing to the bottom.
They are competing who's going to get there first and claiming that, well, you know, I can't stop or this other guy will build a demon or whatever term you would like to use, which will end humanity.
And it's important that it's my demon.
I feel some sort of pride.
You won't.
You're not going to benefit from it.
There is not going to be even a history to the world for you to be the bad guy in history.
It's going to be complete lights out.
If we don't stop now, we can still stop.
We can create very powerful tools, super intelligent tools for solving real world problems like protein folding.
We solved it without creating super intelligence.
It's helping people already.
We can do it in every other domain.
We can get like 99% of benefits out of just creating useful tools.
There is no need to go all the way and create digital god equivalents.
A lot of people in charge of those labs are very young people, rich people.
They have a lot of potential in their future.
I don't think it's a personally good idea for you, for your personal interest, to create this entity.
The thing about nuclear weapons is that we all race to build the best and most powerful, but we tried to refrain from using them, and there were a few close calls.
With AI, there's no perceivable nuclear explosion.
So the idea among the people creating it is, I can make this weapon, I just don't have to deploy it.
You can follow me on X or Twitter at B-R-I-A-N underscore S-A-U-V-E, and that's where I'm most active, but everywhere else as well.
I publish music everywhere you find it, Spotify, under the same name, Brian Silvey, and New Christendom Press is my publishing house.
If you'd like to keep up, if you like this conversation, you'd probably really enjoy Haunted Cosmos.
Highly sound designed, story driven, Look at the world through the lens of Christianity, and at all kinds of things from Bigfoot to DMT to AI and Loeb.
