I happen to dislike Douglas Hofstadter, actually. He isn't nearly smug enough.

The halting problem isn't unsolved at all; there are simple programs that can be fed into the testing framework for which the behavior is impossible to analyze, i.e., undecidable. Perhaps you got "unsolvable" and "undecidable" mixed up.

The original formulation of Pascal's wager is actually quite interesting—it's a game-theoretic probability analysis, described long before game theory was devised and when probability was in its infancy. Pascal's mugging targets the assumptions of the wager rather than its logic: in his writing, the nature of the divine is regarded as immutable, certain, and consistent with church doctrine.

To judge Pascal's intellect we really have to look at the context in which he was writing—the middle of Europe and the height of the witchcraft scare—and observe that he seems to have omitted the possibility of a demon (the sort that witches were alleged to commune with!) posing as a fake god, an idea that was explored extensively in early Christian heresies such as Gnosticism and Marcionism. Moreover the seventeenth century, Huguenots (protestants) were all over France, and so all of his readers would have been intimately familiar with questions of which doctrine was more authentic.

A lot of authors in this period heavily self-censored in order to avoid conflict with the state. Although the Inquisition was no longer active in France, the church had an immense amount of power, and running afoul of it could cost one's livelihood or worse. (Not to mention the sensibilities of patrons.) In some cases we only know an author's real position on occult subjects because of texts that were published posthumously or barely circulated; Isaac Newton, for example, wrote way more on magic and alchemy than on gravitation, calculus, or optics.

It's possible Pascal was not the theological bootlicker we've remembered him as, and, frankly, it's hard to imagine he never considered the flaws of the Wager, considering the messy world he lived in. Unfortunately there's no room for nuance when it comes to the popular narrative of, "child prodigy mathematician drinks too much communion wine and tragically starts spouting nonsense upon reaching adulthood."

Then breathing is animal abuse, and we're all humongous jerks for existing.

Alright. Let me take the gloves off and be serious, since your other new response was a shitpost beyond reckoning.

Trivialism will not help you: the generation of consciousness is undecidable because we do not have a concrete definition of it.

The intended meaning of my comment was that the subjective experience of consciousness, like the Internal Revenue Service, is probably an emergent phenomenon built upon an immensely complex framework. "Missing the forest for the trees" comes to mind—if you're looking at the fundamental interactions that enable the atoms of the trees to exist, you'll never figure out that the trees were planted to spell out a message when viewed from orbit.

This gene, HAR1, is a non-coding RNA that we have known for decades is the smoking gun for human intelligence. It is key to the development of our language skills and absent from chimpanzees. If the authors of the paper were serious about studying the emergence of subjective consciousness, they would throw all their energy into deciphering how this gene influences brain development, then walk backward up the taxonomic tree, repeating the same diff-and-analyze operation until they reached nematodes, which have only a handful of neurons and are so simple that the average person can memorize all of the possible interactions and behaviors of those cells.

There is no room for a God of the Gaps when it comes to nematodes. They can be emulated by a Turing machine with perfect fidelity. They have no subjective experiences beyond those experienced by the billions of macrophages inside of you or a simple paramecium.

Interestingly all of these things thrash around wildly when they receive a fatal injury, ostensibly for the same reason we do—the pain is overwhelming and movement is an efficient way to introduce a competing signal that dilutes the misery. To the layperson seeing this through a microscope for the first time may be a bit horrifying as it seems rather relatable. But it isn't part of consciousness—resisting it is. It's just instinct, the result of a web of signalling molecules and proteins trying to minimize feedback loops caused by negative stimuli.

With all that said—the Simulationist argument is almost always made in bad faith, or as a result of someone acting in bad faith trying to plant seeds in the minds of others. It has long been a thought-terminating cliche wielded by nihilists and eschatologists to justify apathy and other actions that devalue life on this planet. Deciding whether the universe was constructed or not does not matter, because there are no tangible consequences of simply possessing a yes/no answer to that question. Belief will not tell us how to find bugs to exploit, nor will it give us proof we could ever escape from it. To do either, we would need actual direct evidence of artificiality that rules out all alternatives, and even that may not yield any utility.

However, advocates of nihilism do have something to gain from disseminating Simulationism—they get to push narratives about how it is fine to abandon social responsibility. In milder cases of internet-poisoned solipsism, they think it's fine to screw up (because nothing is "real"); more severely, Millerite cultists believe that a completely antisocial value system (donate all your money to the church and wait for the Rapture) is the optimal approach to life. Most dangerous are the oligarchs pushing this narrative: if you do not care about the universe, then you probably don't care about politics and won't stand in their way when they shred public institutions. This is basically what happened in post-Soviet Russia, though they didn't have to work nearly so hard to achieve it.

Because of these manipulative ideologies, anyone who promulgates or advocates a belief in Simulationism needs to be dealt with harshly and cynically to discourage them from openly proselytizing to the public. Unfortunately the battle is, in the main, very much lost for now, but so long as we know how to recognize the enemy we stand a chance of outliving them.

It's all neurons, baby. All neurons.

"Nothing in our math that would generate consciousness?" Wait till you find out there's nothing in any of our cosmological models that would generate the Internal Revenue Service.

Yes. Barely paraphrased.

This article is really an example of the God of the gaps argument, or perhaps the argument from incredulity fallacy, which basically boils down to "science doesn't have an answer for it, so there must be some superlative, transcendent explanation." The possibility that science might later obtain such an answer is discounted.

The authors are victims of Dunning–Kruger: despite their abundance of academic qualifications, they can't even fathom that might be committing a debunked theological trope (and numerous fallacies besides), as they believe they have nothing to learn from those icky, sloppy, backward soft-humanities people from a century and a half ago—yet they are so supreme in their own self-righteousness as shepherds of the True Wisdom of Physics that they feel no hesitation at all to arrogate for their discipline anything that others have failed to conquer.

Yes, it is tradition for shitty philosophers to say "humans can do X, but computers can't do X," even though a rigorous definition of "doing X" has never been provided and may never be possible.

We don't really have a concrete functional definition of what it means for a human to know/understand something (much less "apprehend" it), but the current thinking from AI researchers is almost certainly that it is within reach of a sufficiently powerful LLM with a robust memory mechanism and the ability to make online batch updates. So hearing this No-True-Scotsman crap that boils down to "universe contains X but computers cannot contain X," where X = "read Douglas Hoffstadter while smoking a pipe and sounding, like, deep, man" is absolutely a fossil from ten or twenty years ago.

I realize we're shitting on a paper with four PhDs and a Nobel prize behind it, but come on, guys. If you're going to wander into religious studies, do your homework first.

Then consciousness is the subjective experience of homeostasis—not a quantum effect. That particular pool is too shallow to yield any other interesting fruit.

Yes, that is the problem with the paper in question—it is a giant emesis of jargon meant to bewilder and subjugate peer reviewers so it can smuggle in its narcissistic, premodern slop about consciousness (and therefore observation) being a fundamental physical property rather than an emergent one (which is unrelated to the physical interactions that we euphemistically and somewhat problematically call observation).

Hey, hey. We're picking on the quantum consciousness crackpots in this thread. Go do your No-True-Scotsman dick-measuring somewhere else.

Really more of a demonstration of the weirdness of entangled photons than anything else; the operant mechanism is still a physical interaction, not some grant-farming pseudo-empiricist checking in on the results.

All of these physical phenomena would still occur as they do even if there were no stinking apes in the entire goddamn universe to gawk at them.

Ah, yes. Quantum collapse, of course. What they mean is: "I think the double slit experiment changes its behavior because (ooooh) a human is looking at it, not because there's a fucking thing in the way triggering wave-to-particle transition."

THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE LEPTON OF CONSCIOUSNESS, ONE MOLECULAR ORBITAL OF SOUL. AND YET—AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME DIVINE ORDER TO THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME SPECIALNESS TO HUMANS THAT ELEVATES THEM OVER BACTERIA.

I am sick of physicists rediscovering gnosticism because they haven't read a philosophy book other than Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

True. And it replaces the previous policy of forcing an organization to do the bidding of the administration. DEI was foisted on America through government rules and legal activism.

The perfect rhetorical fortress: you don’t have the correct identity to have an opinion. I’m not white. No matter, there’s something else wrong with my immutable characteristics. Too much butt hair? Cannot have an opinion. And let’s assume that I tick all the immutable characteristics to have an opinion on DEI. Well, I have internalized homophobia/white supremacy/misogyny you name it. The perfect rhetorical fortress. Hermetic.