Wiki-Spawn!

It was the spring of 2004, and a friend of mine had introduced me to Wikipedia for the very first time. Like all unscrupulous brats, the first thing we always simply must do when we discover something new and wonderful is to spend all of our mental and physical resources attempting to vandalize it. We started with the obvious, e.g. changing dates, inserting the odd expletive, creating pages for ourselves with grossly over-adulatory biographies. These edits were always caught with terrifying rapidity, and as we had not yet tired of the project, and like all young men wanted to make a lasting impact on the world, we were forced to adapt our tactics and we began exploring subtlety. We tried keeping the basic facts of an article correct while altering grammar and style to create a variety of bizarre effects - a specialty of mine was a very disorienting juxtaposition of amateurish vocabulary with a sort of erudite, Victorian sentence structure. We would compete, seated side by side in the university library, to see who's edit would last the longest before being caught and reverted. A huge advantage of this arrangement was that we could easily move to another terminal every time our IP address was banned.
When we had tired of this paradigm (after a few weeks I dare say), our youthful audacity once again broke forth and goaded us on to better, more ambitious designs. "After all," we said, "if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well" - this had always been our mantra, which we always applied with ironic impropriety. Our hope was that a bold enough move, if done with sufficient confidence, might just be crazy enough to fool everyone and stick. With particular pride, and to give just one example, I recall inventing a new language, which I continued to work on for several days before all of my efforts were cruelly wiped clean. "Its not fair," I remember thinking, "I speak this language. They have languages on here that no one speaks anymore! Its all so arbitrary!"

Now the really funny business is this. One of my edits really did stick; it was one of the subtle sort, when we were searching out the most obscure corners of human knowledge and attempting to make the most inconsequential additions and subtractions. Every now and then, I check to see if it is still there. It always is. This falsehood began its life on a new page that I created for it. The page was a stub, with only one, very false, very trivial sentence. When he was created, he was one of several in his litter - all pertaining to the same subject (and accordingly referenced on that subject's main page), and all totally false.
This little falsehood has survived a great deal; when he was merged with another page, he managed to keep his head above the raging waters; when this page was split, he managed to avoid the rocks and keep his toes pointed downstream; when his grammar was edited, he kept a straight face. Tragically, all of his brother falsehoods were lost at one point or another, and I still have tremendous admiration for his resilience. I probably needn't say that he had also won my dearest affection, truly a special place in my heart.

Recently I told the story of my little falsehood to a friend of mine, and she promptly Googled him. I realize now how strange it was that it had never occurred to me to do this. I guess I just thought my little falsehood would never grow-up. But what a joy when first I learned that now he had a family of his own! I was so proud. The Google search reported not just the Wikipedia article in which he resided, but also three hundred and fifty six little baby falsehoods! (Let me assure you that my son has a very unique name). But the joy soon faded as I inspected my many grandchildren. In hindsight it is of course obvious, but at the time I was slow in drawing the inference - my falsehood had reproduced asexually. All of his offspring were identical copies - but really, I mean identical. A bit eerie, that. Staring at the rows and rows of these little demons gave me the willies, and it started to change the way I felt about my once dear little, very own, pride-and-joy falsehood. Every time I look at him now a chill runs up my spine and I cannot get the image of all those blankly staring beastly robotic repetitions out of my head. I try to justify it. "How could I have known," I often wail, "that people would blindly trust Wikipedia without checking facts?" Perhaps I made him too good, too resilient, too much of a survivor. Can I destroy him now? Or will that be interpreted as vandalism? And even if I did succeed, how can I possibly defeat all of his spawn - and all of their spawn?

The Literal Sense

Is not synonymous with "the Amelia Bedelia" sense. For example, when I read that "the medievals were literally full of beans"-- I do not understand "literally" to be a clue that if we were to cut them open we would find nothing but beans. Rather it is a clue that "full of beans" is not meant to be symbolic of some other metaphorical truth that would plainly be expressed in some other way, and that the statement really means something about medievals and beans, although exaggerated. (The actual meaning is that beans formed a large part of the medieval diet.)

*In case you don't know, Amelia Bedelia was the main character in a popular series of children's books. She was a nanny/maid and would always take instructions from her employer "over-literally" e.g. spreading dust on the curtains when told to "dust" them, making a cake out of a calendar when told to "make a date cake".

A word on Hegel

The Sense-certainty section is designed to get the whole dialectic engine started on the right track from the very beginning, to avoid the dogmatic assumptions of the modern veil-of-perception skeptic. If we may be permitted to stretch the analogy further, the dialectical forerunner of Pyrrhonist skepticism can be seen, even in this early stage, to make up an important part of the “engine” itself: the explosive combustion of fuel, which in itself is a typically destructive force, can be harnessed within a set of cylinders and orchestrated to drive two offset series of pistons, with a resulting mechanical oscillation that can be translated into forward motion.
The ‘negation’, in Hegelian dialectics, is the force analogous to explosive combustion, and the Pyrrhonist’s equipollence method as something like a single volley in a simple two-cylinder engine, a one-two, left-right, a pow-pow pair of explosions that results in one complete revolution of the axle. The Pyrrhonist himself is wholly occupied with the rotational motion, and only concerned that the axle should return to its initial state so that the whole process should be ultimately neutral. From a higher perch, for example to Hegel, each such rotation brings consciousness closer to its last stop at AbsolutesWissenBahnhof, provided of course that the equipollence engine has been properly constructed, and that the tracks upon which it runs have been properly laid down.

Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom is the one who thinks there is a 20% chance we are living in a computer simulation. His paper, found here, is not concerned with establishing this 20% figure, which he affirms is rather his personal gut feeling. It is more of a trivial exercise in logic, but he makes a number of remarks that are very problematic. Take for example. "Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct)."

This brings up all sorts of difficulties.


Suppose I'm a Nuclear Physicist and you are a computer programmer. I approach you requesting a simulator that will include a newly theorized particle, the awesometron. Now the awesometron is a strange particle, because it participates in none of the four forces. It has no mass, no charge, it does not undergo decay. In fact, this is why we want you to simulate it, because it is entirely unobservable.
So, how do you, the savvy programmer build it into the simulation?
You will nod and smile, fake something, and collect your paycheck.

There is exactly the same problem when people talk about simulating consciousness. Because, you know, consciousness doesn't actually do anything. It just is. And this is why they tend to speak in terms of simulating the brain. Consciousness is somehow caused by the brain, so if done with sufficient attention to detail, then surely consciousness will inevitably (how could it not?) come about.

The trouble is this: when we simulate the heart with sufficient attention to detail, what inevitably comes about is simulated blood flow. Not true blood flow. When we simulate an entire human with sufficient attention to detail, what will inevitably come about is... simulated consciousness, which is nothing. (like the awesometron). What might come about is true consciousness, but to claim that true consciousness will inevitably come about, with out knowing anything at all about how it will happen, is totally without justification.

Later I'll try to put together an argument towards why we should positively expect consciousness to not come about when we simulate a brain.