The Demon
There was this philosopher guy a couple hundred years ago named Descartes.
He came up with a problem that was unsolvable then, and unsolvable now.
The problem was how do we know whether what is happening all around us is real, or just a hallucination?
His idea was that our consciousness is held captive by a demon, and the demon is feeding us all these hallucinations.
One of the most influential science books in the last hundred years is The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins.
The Replicators
He showed through very specific writing how all animals are driven by genes that do not care one bit about any other animal.
But it only seems otherwise because the only stable societies are societies filled with other animals with similarly selfish genes.
They figured this out with a very basic computer algorithm.
They kept trying out different survival strategies, and then let them run for several generations to see which would evolve into the most stable societies.
The observable behavior leading to this problem was why animals don’t fight to the death with their own kinds.
Friendly Lions
Lions, for example, are efficient killers, but lions rarely fight to the death with other lions.
The first two strategies they tried out with the natural selection simulation as all hawks and all doves.
All hawks meant that would always fight to the death with their own kind.
All doves meant they would never fight at all with their own kind.
Stable Societies
Neither led to a stable society, as both types would eventually become extinct.
Computer modeling has come a long, long ways since then.
Ideally, in a few decades, they’ll be able to use computer modeling for much more complex problems.
For example, once they have the entire human genome figured out, they can do drug trials with computer generated algorithms as a first step.
Future Algorithms
And maybe in a hundred years or so, once computers are powerful enough and we have sufficiently advanced ideas about human nature, they might be able to model entire societies.
For example, they could test out different economic policies on computer generated societies to see which would work out the best.
One of the strange things our brains and how we perceive the world around is how limited our senses are.
A Sliver of Reality
Our eyes can only detect a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Our ears can only detect a small fraction of the auditory spectrum.
Our memories of events is also very vague.
Physicists tell us that we can only detect about 10% of the matter in the universe.
Dark Reality
The rest is called Dark Energy, and Dark Matter.
But it’s often confused as being out there, when in reality, it’s everywhere.
Which means when we look around us, it’s possible the reality we can perceive is really only ten percent of what’s really going on.
It’s possible that there are ten separate parallel realities, made up of different kinds of matter and energy, all around us.
Tit For Tat
The simple answer to the selfish gene problem was tit for tat.
Meaning all animals are programmed with a very selfish strategy that only makes it appear there is a kind of group evolution going on.
If you’re a tiger, and another tiger attacks you, you attack it back.
But if the other tiger backs down, you back down.
This is where the idea of tit for tat comes from.
Economic Modeling
Suppose that in a couple hundred years, when they have advanced enough computer software to simulate entire societies.
And suppose they decide that one important component would be to give each computer generated human in that society self awareness.
They wouldn’t be able to do that now, but it’s totally conceivable that they could in fifty years or so.
Time Traveling Philosophers
Which means in the future, we might have the same problem that Descartes did in the past.
Which was how do we know if our reality is real, or if it’s just a computer simulation.
The computer generated people of the future software programs would believe their reality was real.
He Thinks Therefore You Are
Which means Descartes problem is still unsolved.
His answer back then, may be the answer of the future, which may be the answer right now.
The only thing we can be certain of is that we exist.
Which means you looking and me and listening to me could be a hallucination.
That I might not exist.
Are You Hallucinating This?
That I am just part of something you are hallucinating.
Which begs the question.
If you ARE hallucinating right now, why would you hallucinate a weird guy like me?
Why not hallucinate yourself something more enjoyable, like a bunch of porn stars?
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