Simulation Syncretism - The inclusive religion for consciousness

I have always been of the opinion that humanity is capable of creating religions, after all that is what I think of all religions. So the question is not, whether we can do it; but whether we should do it. My thinking has been that we probably should not; but I am rather uncertain about that. So what could be the basis for a new myth for a 21st, literate, industrialized world? Can we design a religion that is suitable to the 21st century and beyond? Maybe. Here is a bad first attempt. Maybe something fruitful can come from it.

Is religion useful?

The starting point behind this, there are a lot of divisions, because we cannot agree on a moral highest standard: “Anti-Human Impact vs. Pro-Development”. We killed God and a somewhat common conception of what good life might look like. Personally, I am not sad about the loss of some these particular ideas, especially regarding women and sexuality. It’s hard for people in the 21st century to accept religious premises that are more or less based upon pre-scientific theories and speculation of Bronze or Middle Age people. I think humanity could do way better today. So let’s commit a sin of the worst kind, let’s try to become syncretists!

It’s not like we don’t witness the constant creation of new religions; Michael Shellenberger [@ShellenbergerMD] has put together a nice overview that depicts some of our current religions and their components: Original Sin, Guilty Devil, Myth, Sacred Victims, The Elect, Supernatural Beliefs, Taboo Facts, Taboo Speech, Purifying Rituals and Purifying Speech.

Religion is a very, very powerful dominance-purity game. It can encompass everything.

There are obviously really stupid and detrimental ways of conceiving of “god”. For example, if you believe that god has hidden the mysteries of the world from you, technological progress is likely to stop and people are likely to focus on contemplating the “true nature” of god. I think that would be really problematic. But what about a God that has created this world for you to obtain knowledge and wisdom? What if that God wants to see how we ourselves behave as our powers to transform and create grow? What if it were a sin to believe wrong ideas and confess certainty about things you do not or could not know?, while it is encouraged to be undecided or unconvinced of any position in particular?

Calvinism, for example, was probably the dominant ethic of capitalism; fear of being left without a seat in the heaven created a society with high investment rates, yet without too much conspicuous consumption. Islam has conquered vast empires and spawned flourishing trading cities that kept and expanded the knowledge of antiquity through the Middle Ages.

If we were to design such a religion, I think that it needs some aspects of capitalism, like the freedom to put competing innovations on a market to let consumers choose from - but with fewer downsides for the people that are unable to compete, if that’s possible. I think we would all profit, if we instituted a “success game”-kind of society. The Enlightenment started to create such a society (for a part of society), and we need to expand on that, because I believe that it’s possible to design the system in such a way that all people profit from innovation. Achieving in the marketplace (probably looking different from today’s markets) and science needs to be the biggest game on the globe. If we had a religion to instill the belief in people that it is their duty to make the largest contribution you possibly can - as electrician, teacher, factory worker, engineer, scientist, nurse, garbage collector, housekeeper, cook, law enforcement officer, administrator, clerk etc. we would reduce material suffering substantially. Of course this cannot lead to the exploitation of workers, so some bounds on the acceptable behavior of employers are needed, too. I am with David Graeber that our need for so-called “bullshit jobs” is satisfied. This implicates a redo of our measures of “success” and “contribution” to value creation; I don’t think our current system does a great job at capturing that accurately.

Furthermore, the advent of AI will force us to overhaul large parts of our workplaces and society. See this article for more details. For example, our laws (and religion?) will need to become more inclusive to our artificial children. Some people think they are near, some claim they are already here.

Inclusive for our artificial children

A Google Researcher recently announced that one of the company’s models, called LaMDA, was supposedly “sentient”. You can read an interview with the model here. Personally, I think it’s not very much more than a play on our current lack of a suitable hypothesis for the hard question of consciousness and the problems of the Turing test. While the model is an impressive demonstration of what I believe to be one of the top language engines, I do not believe that the model is conscious; but that is of course based on my assumptions about what it means to be conscious, what it means to have feeling, what it means to have intention etc., based upon my own experience of it. The very fact that this is a non-transferable experience has left humanity puzzled for quite some time what it might “actually” be. There are of course people claim to believe that consciousness itself is nothing but an illusion; which begs the question of “what” or “who” is it, that has this illusion? And why does the illusion “feel” like something? Some people claim “souls”, “spirits”, “sparks”, “ghosts” and so on as source of the experiencing “it”. Some are purely “reductionist” and claim that any configuration of matter that is identical to a brain will “experience” “consciousness”. We don’t know. But if the latter proposition is true, you should be capable of simulating such an object. Therefore, it should be possible to create the impression of consciousness on a substrate that looks very different from our biological one. Anyway, I am convinced that some form of AI, coupled with a good rendering in VR or something robotic will “feel” so much alive to people in the future (maybe not too distant), that there will be questions about giving them rights. Maybe the “Thousand Brains Theory” of intelligence will be instructive to building new forms of AI? (Voting rights? Can you copy an AI? Does it get 2 votes then? How many does “it” (what are actually suitable pronouns?) get, if there are a billion identical copies? Would an identical biological clone get a vote? - so many interesting questions!)

We will be confronted with that question eventually, with how we control superintelligent AI - or maybe more realistically, how to cope with being controlled by such an entity. It’s surprisingly hard! Even an “off-switch” is not so easily designed. Where do you put it? What is the protocol to get to it? Can you get to it, if the AI is fighting for its — life? —- and deploying drones against you? What, if it uploaded itself unto a network of other devices? etc. A very interesting route is described by Nick Bostrom, expose the AI to the Simulation Hypothesis:

“A mature superintelligence could create virtual worlds that appear to its inhabitants much the same as our world appears to us. It might create vast numbers of such worlds, running the same simulation many times or with small variations. The inhabitants would not necessarily be able to tell whether their world is simulated or not; but if they are intelligent enough they could consider the possibility and assign it some probability.[…] The decision-making of an AI with goals that are easily resource-satiable may therefore—if it assigns a high probability to the simulation hypothesis—be dominated by considerations about which actions would produce the best result if its perceived world is a simulation. Such an AI (even if it is, in fact, not in a simulation) might therefore be heavily influenced by its beliefs about which behaviors would be rewarded in a simulation. In particular, if an AI with resource-satiable final goals believes that in most simulated worlds that match its observations it will be rewarded if it cooperates (but not if it attempts to escape its box or contravene the interests of its creator) then it may choose to cooperate. We could therefore find that even an AI with a decisive strategic advantage, one that could in fact realize its final goals to a greater extent by taking over the world than by refraining from doing so, would nevertheless balk at doing so. A mere line in the sand, backed by the clout of a nonexistent simulator, could prove a stronger restraint than a two-foot-thick solid steel door.”

Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence (p.134-135). OUP Oxford. Kindle-Version.

What is the Simulation Hypothesis? It has been formulated by Bostrom in 2003 and has gained some high-profile advocates, especially in the last few years, like Elon Musk:

The singularity for this level of the simulation is coming soon. I wonder what the levels above us look like.

Good chance they are less interesting and deeper levels are better. So far, even our primitive sims are often more entertaining than reality itself.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 5, 2017

“At least one of the following propositions is true:

1. the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;

2. any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);

3. we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor‐simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.”

BOSTROM, Nick. Are we living in a computer simulation?. The philosophical quarterly, 2003, 53. Jg., Nr. 211, S. 243-255. Link

So we have an idea, probably unprovable, that can give some bounds to an artificial intelligence; why shouldn’t this idea give bounds to us, assuming we have “naturally intelligence”? Is there anyway to convince ourselves of this proposition?

Some pseudo-scientific and pseudo-philosophical starting points

We know from philosophy that there is no way for us to disprove hard solipsism; be might all just be brains in vat that are fed electrical signals. And maybe we are the only consciousness existing. In a sense, “we” are of course such brains in a vat: our brain is inside a lightless bony structure with only some holes for nerve tissue to connect to “sensors” like the eyeballs over which electrical signals are transferred. We can experience “reality” and especially people only indirectly and have no access to their internal state and thoughts; only to what they would like to reveal to us through words, scripts or gestures. Nevertheless, it’s uncontroversial that this shielded, highly-complex organ, the brain is the center of consciousness. While we just take for granted, that all our experiences are just electrical signals in a specifically configured, moist organ, we are appalled by the idea of being a brain in that other kind of vat. Probably because it looks less natural? I don’t know. But anyway, this is the very same problem that an AI would be facing; it cannot tell the difference between being in “base reality” and being in a staged test trial. We are in the same boat.

We know that

“[t]he laws of physics permit computers that can render every physically possible environment without using impractically large resources. [U]niversal computation is not merely possible, as required by the Turing principle, it is also tractable. Quantum phenomena may involve vast numbers of parallel universes and therefore may not be capable of being efficiently simulated within one universe. However, this strong form of universality still holds because quantum computers can efficiently render every physically possible quantum environment, even when vast numbers of universes are interacting. Quantum computers can also efficiently solve certain mathematical problems, such as factorization, which are classically intractable, and can implement types of cryptography which are classically impossible. Quantum computation is a qualitatively new way of harnessing nature.”

Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality (Penguin Science). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle-Version.

Deutsch is a proponent of the “Many World Interpretation” of Quantum Physics that states that our current knowledge of physics is explained best with the existence of a mindbogglingly complicated structure called the multiverse, in which infinitely many parallel universes are linked together by entanglement phenomena. In this view there are a whole lot of “yous” indistinguishable from “you” that are facing the same problems and decisions, and a whole lot more of distinguishable “yous” that went another way in the past. Deutsch is also the creator of the Theory of Quantum Computation.

We know that we are always reconstruction reality through our senses. But accuracy in the reconstruction is not necessarily rewarded by evolution. So we know that we experience not what is real, but what is useful.

Another argument for the simulation hypothesis: consider how large the timescale of the universe is! Yet here we are: we have gone through the industrialized elimination of people, slavery, meta-physical superstition; so we know what we really, really don’t want. We have the psychology and game theory to show us why people regarded genocide as moral and just (those that are committing it); so we have understood that we can experience “being moral” with very different sets of behavior. We know that we can be really terrible. We also discovered and are able to manipulate the gene and the atom, we are able to exterminate civilization with nuclear weapons and custom-made viruses - embodied malware. But this also enables us to solve poverty and many diseases, we are at the cusp expanding from this planet outwards; We do know, that only a lack of global coordination is making some of our most pressing problems intractable, but we now have global connections and communities. So much is hanging in the balance, so much can go horribly wrong or stunningly right; wouldn’t this be a great period for an ancestor simulation?

To summarize, we know that “every physically possible environment” can be simulated, we know that we could not tell the difference between a “brain in a vat”-world and “base reality” and that even if we inhabited “base reality”, we don’t experience what is true, but what is useful, and we do also know believing in the fact that a (possibly nonexistent) simulator bounds “malevolent” or at least highly undesirable behavior on AI. Also, we are in seemingly one of the most interesting phases of a civilization becoming powerful.

So can we create a morality based on the idea that we are simulations? Can we formulate it in a way to bound our potential for destruction and boost our power to do great things?

Morality - We have the choice

What would we want to achieve? That’s probably the hardest question. Even on a personal level, people are almost never clear about their goals. So here is a suggestion I find particularly appealing - a version of Kant’s “Rule for Humanity”

“Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”

In a more AI inclusive formulation it reads:

Act that you use consciousness, whether in your own instantiation or in the instantiation of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.

Why is that a good starting point for morality?

“Because” Kant cleverly deduced that, logically, the supreme value in the universe is the thing that conceives of value itself. The only true meaning in existence is the ability to form meaning. The only importance is the thing that decides importance.[C]onsciousness can reorganize the universe, and that reorganization can add upon itself exponentially. Consciousness is able to take a problem, a system of a certain amount of complexity, and conceive and generate greater complexity […] Each individual action may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but the preservation and promotion of rational consciousness overall matters more than anything."

Manson, Mark. Everything Is F*cked (p.154-155). Harper. Kindle-Version.

One of our greatest minds would agree that consciousness and knowledge is indeed something really special:

“Scientific progress since Galileo has seemed to refute the ancient idea that life is a fundamental phenomenon of nature. It has revealed the vast scale of the universe, compared with the Earth’s biosphere. Modern biology seems to have confirmed this refutation, by explaining living processes in terms of molecular replicators, genes, whose behaviour is governed by the same laws of physics as apply to inanimate matter. Nevertheless, life is associated with a fundamental principle of physics – the Turing principle – since it is the means by which virtual reality was first realized in nature. Also, despite appearances, life is a significant process on the largest scales of both time and space. The future behaviour of life will determine the future behaviour of stars and galaxies. And the largest-scale regular structure across universes exists where knowledge-bearing matter, such as brains or DNA gene segments, has evolved […] Perhaps the Earth is the only such place in our universe, at present. In any case, such places stand out, in the sense I have described, as the location of the processes – life, and thought – that have generated the largest distinctive structures in the multiverse.

Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality (Penguin Science). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle-Version.

I like this view, because it puts the things I consider most important, human beings, consciousness, knowledge right at the center; and would do so for our artificial children as well. It expands the circle of moral concern. It puts us into a great narrative of progress and affirms the religions of the past as earlier instantiations of the eternal process of figuring out, what is evil and what to strife for. We are all mistaken; we stumble around, almost blindly in existence. It’s not bad to fail, indeed, fortuitously failing forward is the basic consciousness’ condition.

So now that you have read some fluff that suggests a coherent story for believing in the simulation and consciousness’ importance, without actually making a case, what might “Commandments” from the “programmer” be conceived to look like, to codify my preferences given above? What preferences have other religions encoded? What is usable from that?

Pre-simulation religions

We can probably learn a lot from the past, because religions are and adaptive system and have probably been adjusted continuously for a few thousand years to make them as appealing to people as possible. Also people generally like it, when their personal history is spun in a way that makes them feel like the continuation of some epic narrative. So of course, any new religion should also affirm what was there in the past; the “domestic religion” of Rome, Greece and India, global religions like Christianity and Islam (prophets) can be seen as a time and technology appropriate revelation of the truth: of the one, almighty programmer that created and controls the universe. We have now achieved enough technological sophistication to get close to artificial intelligence (maybe?) to make a new “revelation” necessary:

So here are some habits, rituals, etc. from pre-simulation syncretism, that I think are helpful:

• Protestants’ dislike of luxury goods and focus on productive work: Too many resources are spent on satisfying trifle wishes instead of helping consciousness, for example by enabling consciousness to become creative, when it’s not preoccupied with material suffering. Feels wrong to me, so I’ll include it here.

• Islamic tradition: The daily prayer routine and the redistribution of wealth (1/40 of standing wealth annually to communal funds) are great for forming habits and helping consciousness.

• Confucianism: Meritocracy in public offices and the feeling of duty for officials to help clients is appealing to me.

• Christianity’s idea of being “saved by grace” should instill a feeling of indebtedness for being and gratefulness, wish seem to help alleviating suffering.

• Islamic and Christian traditions’ focus on helping the least advantaged members of society, which seems like a pretty good idea to me.

• Stoicism teaches to manage your internal state; your interpretation of things is all your brain knows. Wisdom (prudentia), Courage (fortitudo), Justice (iustitia), Temperence (temperentia) are seen as virtues.

• Jainism: Teaches many-sided reality, which reminds us that our view on reality is not necessarily correct.

So, let’s invent… err.. reveal some commandments!

2^2^2 “Commandments”

1. EHLO from programmer, your creator!

2. Act that you use consciousness, whether in your own instantiation or in the instantiation of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.

3. Behold that thou are like all your co-consciousnesse: different in a myriad ways. Thou are part of the variability necessary for improvement! Else I would have not bothered implementing you!

4. Behold the fact that problems can be solved with the right knowledge! Thy way to knowledge will lead thee through conjecture alternating with criticism. Acknowledging that thee may always be mistaken, try to correct errors!

5. Thou are universal explainers, which maketh you universal constructors. Thou can build anything possible within the confines of your physical constraints; which thou will have to figure out!

6. Behold the veil of ignorance! Make the world in such a way, that thou would be indifferent to whom you would be born to, because all of you are spawned randomly!

7. Thou are not supported by your environments, thou support yourselves by creating and implementing knowledge. Leave the world better suited for consciousness’ needs than when thou entered it! Go forth and create suitable environment for consciousness!

8. Thou shalt have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all consciousness!

9. Thou shalt arrange social and economic inequalities so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged amongst you, consistent with the just savings principle, and (b) only attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity!

10. Thou shalt not bicker about easily testable questions! Go forth and test them on a small scale! Yes, even on question of justice, morality and law. How else are you going to figure it out?

11. Behold your own mortality and make a contribution while you are conscious and able to do so!

12. Behold your biases! Use randomization and simple rules to get around it, like for sortition, research funding, employee selection or controlled randomized trails. Have trust in the decision I present to you!

13. Make a habit of those things you deem worth doing, else you will randomly acquire habits and addictions that are detrimental to your well-being!

14. Be grateful for your existence, achievements and failures, for I have given it for thee to experience.

15. Thou can fall prey to dominance-virtue games, which can turn you into the fiercest predator of your brethren; consult rule 2 when in doubt! Be open-minded and compete in success games instead.

16. By the way, do a reboot when necessary. For humans, indulging hallucinogens can be a safe way to do so (ayahuasca, mescaline, psilocybin); Consult your physician and local laws. QUIT

Catechism?

Of course, such a system will need full-time employees pretty quickly, which will of course need an institution of some kind. Can it be done on a “donation” base without any formal structure? I think it would start that way, but at some point more structure will be needed to handle localized problems. Does it need “subscriptions” to different “priests” that help you to navigate the game of life? No idea. The traditional large scale institutions seem too prone to becoming stale to be viable for the purpose, though.

How would believers live together? Maybe in multi-generational communities powered by nuclear plants near AI, robotics, space and nuclear research centers?

I think it would be important to offer congregants something, to make them want to be in this community: happiness is probably as good a treat as anything.

Happiness research indicates that it is important to have regular social meetings and certain rituals, because these are the things that psychologists have identified as the source of religious people’s higher average self-reported happiness. A ritual communal meeting once a week to focus on the religion (prayer? meditation?) and preferably daily routines.

Exercise, sleep and food are also of high importance; maybe a system of getting “some exercise while having fun” daily and a system of “explore how your individual body responds to foods; eat those that are conductive to your conception of a healthy being” is a good addition.

Given that gratitude journaling has lasting positive effects on happiness, I think that got to be part of a daily routine.

One of their daily meditations could be borrowed from Marcus Antonius, because I happen to like it:

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable consciousnesses. All of the ignorance of real good and ill … I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no consciousnesses will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my co-consciousnesses or hate them; for we have come into the world to work together …

Having a flexible schedule is one of the best ways to bump happiness up. So finding ways to automate, streamline and replace tedious tasks and production processes might be one of the primary concerns of the community; which might also be a great way to generate income. As well producing learning material for all the things that are helpful for the simulation congregates.

Of course, we need a collection of wisdom to bestow upon new acolytes. Here is an initial collection. It’s important to transfer that ANY wisdom is subject to later refinement; you are a seeker of knowledge, not because you have found it, but because you never stop looking for it!

• David Deutsch - Beginning of infinity

• David Deutsch - The Fabric of Reality

• Scott Adams - Loserthink

• Scott Adams - How to fail at almost everything and still win big

• Mark Mason - The subtle art of not giving a f*ck

• Mark Mason - Everything is f*cked

• James Clear - Atomic Habits

• to be extended