Here's a philosophic question I've been dwelling on. I will explain the premise and then provide an example...

Here's a philosophic question I've been dwelling on. I will explain the premise and then provide an example. We have world prime and world beta, world beta exists within world prime, and is controlled by world prime. These rules exist to at least some variation of world prime (for example gravity on earth and the moon, gravity is much stronger on earth than the moon but they both exist just different amounts). And well world Prime has complete, and undeniable power and vision of world beta, is it possible for world beta to draw any sort of inference about world prime's rules other than it's possible existence.

My example is a mental health containment ward, Man B lives inside of this ward, in a solid white cube room that is 16ft wide, 16ft deep, and 16ft tall and the room is well like by 1 light not allowing any shadows within the room. He has lived in this room his whole memorable life, but yet is able to speak, spell, and has all major mental capabilities of a high school student (though may not be applicable in this world) and can not see himself (via a mirror or any other means). Man A lives outside of the containment ward, He is aware of the Containment ward, and man B's entire "world". Is there anyway for man B to ever extrapolate the outside world, the world that controls his?

>I will be bumping with wallpapers for 5 minutes before i just let thread die. thank you.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism
twitter.com/AnonBabble

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Last self bump if no interest is shown.

How can he possibly understand the outside world if he cannot observe anything outside his containment unit?

It would all just be speculation with no proof.

This is why I laugh at these insane theories that talk about things outside our universe - e.g. multiverse, quantum universe, shit like that, because there is absolutely no way we can know whether we are right or not. Same with the idea of God, no way to prove he exists because he's outside our realm, so it's all wishful speculation.

But we understand our universes rules, to some varying degree, we have atleast put forth the idea we are not world prime, with this knowledge is it at all possible to extrapolate some idea about a world prime? maybe the rules that govern it? the man in containment is aware of gravity, though he may not be able to explain it thoroughly he is aware that he is not constantly off the ground.

perhaps the answer lies within him yes. Most likely though, he will go crazy

Trying to understand the world beyond ours is like a dog trying to understand a computer, most likely

The one way he might sort of do this, as I see it, is if he were to start imagining different possible universes at random. He would eventually hit on how the outside world really is(remember that infinity is a very long time).
However, he would have no way of knowing that he was correct.

>Trying to understand the world beyond ours is like a dog trying to understand a computer, most likely

We have with much put forth effort found that gorillas though not capable of extreme intelligent tasks yet, can communicate with us. Based off that idea i wouldn't put it passed other animals to adapt to a humans world and communicate and use our technology

Sorry, I forgot to mention that one assumption of this scenario is that the man has infinite time

I will grant you that assumption being that it does not directly impact the idea.

The question is can he correctly assume rules that govern with any certainty and if not can he be atleast aware that the rule exists outside of his world. He is aware of gravity but can he make a direct assumption that gravity exists outside of his world?

when there is any interconnection beetween the two world then yes.

in the white room you can make your guess from the outside world about your food surplay.

you can guess there must be more.
you can guess some daily timeframe.
you can develop weired therories about a god.

>He is aware of gravity but can he make a direct assumption that gravity exists outside of his world?
This is a tricky question, because strictly speaking you can't assume the existence of gravity at all, or of the validity of any natural law. It can only ever be, as you say, an assumption.
1/2

Imagin these are laws of his world.
Gravity
Light
Hunger
Thirst
These all exist for him, maybe not constantly but is aware of them that they are definitives of his life inside this universe. knowing this is true is he able to extrapolate that Light exists in some variation to his own in world prime. whether it be colorful, colorless, weighted, friction-less, or have weight.
Assume the interconnection is mild at best. food would appear well unconscious or say between blinks.
>you can guess some daily timeframe
how do you figure?
Just so i can be blunt with your response you strictly adhere to the idea that no correct inference could be made with supplied information correct?

Because of this, the phrase "correctly assume" becomes problematic. There's no way of determining correctness, ever.
This is why all science attempts to do is to imagine a model/ruleset that best explains our experiences and observations. But in such a blandly furnished room as you describe, there's very little to work with.
He has gravity, yes, but only as a downward force. He may imagine the world thrusting upward eternally, as some early philosophers did. If there are no loose objects in the room then he has no means of inferring Newton's 3 laws of motion. etc etc

2/2

By that logic, he will assume the entire world is lit by electric lights constantly, is completely flat, dry and devoid of life, and whatever temperature the thermostat is.

Do you believe a law inside world beta could exist without some variation of it in world Prime?

>Assume the interconnection is mild at best. food would appear well unconscious or say between blinks.

you can still develop theories. they must not fit with the prime world. when you are unconscious when the food appears then you can guess that there is another being what dont want to be regonized. you could in the next step try to interact with it and leaving messages. ideal case mathematical message which doesnt base on the need of a language and see if you get an reaction.

messsage would be like

aa=b
aaaa=bb
aaaaaa=


>you can guess some daily timeframe
how do you figure?

you can devide your time in parts of food deliver timeframes.

I believe you said Beta existed within Prime. Therefore basic set theory says that any law in Beta is automatically in Prime.
But perhaps you meant the part of Prime which isn't Beta. We have no precedent for it, but certainly it's possible.

more from this style please

Frankly speaking, you didn't put enough thought into this thought experiment.

There is no way someone would be able to speak, spell, and generally speaking have all major mental capacities of a half-way decent high school student without some knowledge of others and an outside world of some sort existing. This level of memetics has an INCREDIBLE amount of knowledge and experience behind it. This knowledge simply cannot exist within a vacuum.

We haven't gotten smarter as a species for tens of thousands, and potentially hundreds of thousands, of years. It took an incredible amount of exponential cultural tradition and growth to reach where we're at today with an average high school student's ability to critically think and problem solve.

As another user pointed out, where is the food coming from? The light certainly comes from somewhere. He has a high school level intelligence at least and can speak, spell, and presumably do basic math? He must understand, in some small way, how electricity works. I did fucking electricity and basic circuit completion with a light bulb in 7th grade science, covered resistance and ohms and errythang.

Given this person's experience with the outside world, they may not truly KNOW to an absolute certainty very much about inconsequential details (If the room I am in is in a larger room, what color is the larger room?), but could easily deduce a huge number of factors when it at least comes to a basis of understanding the reality that governs the outside world as well.

>when you are unconscious when the food appears then you can guess that there is another being what don't want to be recognized.

I feel like this pushes to much that you are aware of persons outside of your world which i want to get away from. If you follow that idea to it's fullest you could apply that to our world that their is a god. A benevolent one at that.

>you can divide your time in parts of food deliver time frames.

I don't think you could create an accurate time frame simply based on you scheduled or unscheduled consciousness (or lack there of).

I'm starting to think my situation is a bad idea and might have to rethink this entirely.

I did, but putting what i said in
implies that the law is not in world prime but purely fabricated
google sakimichan.

>If you follow that idea to it's fullest you could apply that to our world that their is a god.

thats what i mean

How would the guy have the language of a high schooler? How did he learn to speak when he never even learned the names for objects, only existing in a white room? How would he learn verbs? Words for emotion? With no person interact with him? You are basically stating an impossible scenario.

>There is no way someone would be able to speak, spell, and generally speaking have all major mental capacities of a half-way decent high school student without some knowledge of others and an outside world of some sort existing. This level of memetics has an INCREDIBLE amount of knowledge and experience behind it.

generalize Amnesia.

>We haven't gotten smarter as a species for tens of thousands, and potentially hundreds of thousands, of years. It took an incredible amount of exponential cultural tradition and growth to reach where we're at today with an average high school student's ability to critically think and problem solve.

I agree but i don't understand the relevance.

>As another user pointed out, where is the food coming from?

You blink, and there is a cheese burger infront of you. for sake of disagreement we will assume the outside work has a for of "knock out syrup". they can give remotly do as they need, and administer an antidote to wake him seeming as if no time had passed.

> He has a high school level intelligence at least and can speak, spell, and presumably do basic math? He must understand, in some small way, how electricity works. I did fucking electricity and basic circuit completion with a light bulb in 7th grade science, covered resistance and ohms and errythang.

assuming this is all true what would he do with this knowledge? and how would he apply it?

>... deduce a huge number of factors when it at least comes to a basis of understanding the reality that governs the outside world as well.

could i have an example.

is it safe for me to assume you are theist then?
I like this idea quite a bit, puts a new twist on theism for me, being that im agnostic.

Generalize amnesia.

>google sakimichan.
wow thanx

I also recommend googling "fish eye placebo". but that's more a personal taste.

Because we're able to measure and observe them.

This guy however is just going to go completely and utterly insane in his cell.

You are so fucking dumb, did you come up with this on your own or did you have help coming up with this hypothetical.

In short, I think the only way of extrapolating the rules of the outside world are using stimulus received from it (including prior education as others here have pointed out) and through guessing, probably a combination of the two.
I believe this because there's no other way of acquiring information, you either gather it from your senses or you make it up.
I would argue that we, as a species, are also the "man in the white room". We have only the universe we are able to detect and infer laws from, but we are also capable of supposing an external world with laws other than ours, as evidenced by this very thread.

Also, enjoy some weeb trash.

i am atheist becouse the lack of any interaction with a prime world in our real world.
if there was any then i could be a theist.

You can't be fucking serious. Did you just take an intro to philosophy course at your local community college or something? I remember my first beer.

muh amnesia

muh knowledge application

Go get fucked.

I think you're a little late to the party in Plato's cave.

as speaking from the white room. you cant explain the creation of food with anything inside your world.
so you must assume there is a outer world and can develop a god theory.
Our real world doesnt have this.

consciouness would be one but thats in yourself and no outer phaenomen.

>ignored on basis of not following ideas and simply speaking ad hominem

>In short, I think the only way of extrapolating the rules of the outside world are using stimulus received from it (including prior education as others here have pointed out) and through guessing, probably a combination of the two.
I believe this because there's no other way of acquiring information, you either gather it from your senses or you make it up.

this is essentially where i sit. but i wanted to see if there was any additional input.

>I would argue that we, as a species, are also the "man in the white room". We have only the universe we are able to detect and infer laws from, but we are also capable of supposing an external world with laws other than ours, as evidenced by this very thread.

that was the grounds of the idea, but i tried to reframe it to try and force other thoughts.

Understandable. sorry for my vain inference. Well i'm going to take this to the next level then. we as man have no "direct interaction" with world prime. but we are aware of objects around us such as animals, of which we did not previously did not know about, or at least the exact location of them, as the man is aware of his food, but not where it lives or comes from.

>ignored on basis of not following ideas and simply speaking ad hominem

I will have to look this up mind giving me a simple TL;DR?

>Our real world doesnt have this.
I guess i have to agree with you on basis, that go as it stands now is a god of the gaps. Only being used to explain what we don't know yet. I think the only possible retort i could use would be something stupid as "where did the big bang come from?" which you could respond ever oscillating universe correct?

>we as man have no "direct interaction" with world prime. but we are aware of objects around us such as animals

they point in creating a god theory is the need of something what is not explainable. founding new animals doesnt belong to this.

>"where did the big bang come from?"
when you explain the creation of the universe with a god then who created god ? And when god dont need to be created then why the universe ?

I'm sorry the idea isn't finding a "new animal" as in a species previously unknown, but an animal that was not already there, in a position you can now view well not being there previously. One way or another what
said pretty much invalidates this idea.

well i guess i know have to reform this idea. or at the very least a better hypothetical, thank you everyone for entertaining this idea.

jeez my typing is abysmal tonight
know > *now

so you want find the prime world ?

finding it would be nice.
understanding it would be a good stepping stone.

Well that's going under the assumption it exists aswell i guess.

you doesnt sound like an agnostic for me
if you would be agnostic you just would not care about a prime world

Oh sweet summer child.

It's almost as if you don't realize that your magical non-groggy and instantaneous knockout gas made you get written off because you're a step away from brain in a jar solipsism.

Oh wait, that's because you don't.

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

But seriously bruv. You're not deep. You're in your late teens. You'll realize in about 10-15 years you're being a bigger asshole about this than I am. And that's fucking saying something.

i disagree i'm very curious about "world prime" and it's existence. Whether it be by a god or gods, if we are are apart of a simulation of sorts. But to entertain your idea, what about agnostics makes you think that i would have no interest in "world prime"?

>ignored on basis of not following ideas, simply speaking ad hominem and strawmanning.

>brain in a jar solipsism
Sup Forums you teach me every day something new :)

not op. i am somewhat Solipsism, Didnt know a word exists for it

The answer is no. But your thought experiment isn't well thought out.

There could also be a world alpha that has absolute power over world prime, and another world that controls world alpha, and so on ad infinitum.

So instead of positing world prime you would just frame the question as whether it is possible to inference knowledge of anything outside of human experience. That answer is a definite no.

>i disagree i'm very curious about "world prime" and it's existence.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism

The simulation argument assumes either one of two things:

1.having the property of being conscious does not distinguish the simulation from the conscious being

2.having the property of being conscious does distinguish them, but the conscious person could not tell whether he is a conscious person or simulation

Assumption 1 is kinda extreme and not really defensible. Assumption 2 is kinda stupid because you can introspectively tell whether you are conscious. You might not definitively prove consciousness of another being through inference but you can for yourself through introspection.

Since simulation argument argues that the probability of you being a simulation is high, that is completely void once you can tell whether you are indeed conscious.

>Plato's allegory of the cave

not even close

user's worlds are completely separate, where world beta cannot have access to world prime. Not the case for Plato.

yes, it's called having an imagination. dipschtick

>Agnosticism is the philosophical view that the existence of God or the supernatural are unknown and unknowable
>unknownable
gooot it, so how you describe me user?

I guess i just personally have a hard time accepting this as true.

>You might not definitively prove consciousness of another being through inference but you can for yourself through introspection.
I disagree I could make the argument that we are not conscious at all and simply follow a simple algorithm, similar to the idea of seeking and desiring: shelter, food, sex, and knowledge of the world around us.

I really need to read about this cave.

>ignored on basis of not following ideas, simply speaking ad hominem and strawmanning.
here is your (you)

its easy to affirm your consciousness, humans can think logical contradictions. we can actually have thoughts that are completely unintelligible to computational machines which are built on logic. we can have cognitive dissonance, but such things are not available to machines.

also, if you think of algorithm as self-preserving, you can commit suicide right now (dont do it) to disobey that

without reading any other comments:
depends
b could make a gamble and do:
>suicide
>destroy the cube
>fill the cube with his shit
>try to lure person A in his cube for many reasons
imo everything depends on A's reaction

if B was a physic guy with physic equipment, he could try to measure world A's influence in world B
for example: the gravity or energy comming from outside the box

anyway, why should B be bothered by world A in the first place?
there is also the possibility for man A to destroy world B if he sees it as a danger for anything

to put it in a nutshell, i wouldn't mind world A if i was B bc of our lack of knowledge

but just imagining it would not mean he has any knowledge of the outside world - any details that happened to be true about the outside world that he made up a> he wouldn't know they were true and b. would only be true by chance.

it could be that there is a world identical to that outlined int The Lord of the rings - but we have no knowledge of that, and Tolkien could not be said to have any awareness of it.

more importantly,I think the terms of the initial thought experiment are misleading.

if he lived in a shadowless box, how could he imagine anything much at all? he has no data on which to expand. Try to imagine the most horrible monster you can - the best you can do is put bits of already known nasty stuff together - the Alien in aliens, the things in videogames, the the monsters of classical literature - they rely on stuff we already know about.

I doubt that this example could be possible - unless the man had lots of stuff to interact with he would not have the mental capacity of a high school student, and he would not have the capacity for speech or higher thought processes, because his total lack of stimulus would not allow those or require those to develop. he would be mute and unimaginative, and couldn't even fantasize about another world.

People seem to be taking the cell example literally such as claiming that he'd go crazy or be unable to speak in the first place.

Did you mean for the example to be interpreted this way?

Not at all, as
I made it horribly misleading, i'm sorry.
I don't think i can contend that to be honest with you. please give me a bit more time to think about this, also please keep in mind im not the best person to contend your arguement.

just so i can make it a bit easier on myself would you mind giving me an example of a cognitively dissonant idea?

So the way I'm interpreting the question is that there is an initial transfer of information from A to B (eg. Gravity) that establishes the world space of B. After that, all information within B is transfered to A but only select information from A is transfered to B?

for example, posting a tweet about the vices of materialism on a brand new iphone

most of the examples rely on the fact that 99% of what we do, we do it unconsciously e.g. you aren't conscious of lifting leg, extending foot, etc when you walk, so our mental rational faculty will not always check our contradictions

we might be so dumb that machines cannot even stoop to our level because they are programmed on boolean logic, so we know when we do dumb shit we aren't simulated machines

simulations can simulate irrationality, but im not sure it can simulate stupidity and simultaneous inconsistency in thought

Solipsist, is the term for person who believes in solipsism, and has solipsistic ideas

why do you say premise 1> is extreme?

surely the point if the simulation argument is that we think we are individual conscious beings walking about in a real world, having introspective ideas, but actually, we are not - we are AI, being fed simulated world data. There is no need for there to be millions of such AI - even one, that like the brain in the vat does not know it is just getting data feeds, not real world feeds.

another example

rules have meaning either through a community convention or built in axioms

for instance, take the rule +2 to 1 and keep going

usually you would list 3,5,7,9 etc

but i could list 3,5,9

you ask where did the 7 go? i say in my community or according to my axioms +2 actually means add two until 5, then add four, then keep adding two

so a simulation which is based on computation is forced to adopt boolean logic, and even if they develop new language and rules through robot community it would be shared

you can affirm you are not a simulation by deriving a completely retarded set of axioms that nobody would ever understand except for yourself, for example, by equating +2 to mean minus two unless i piss in a jar named kek, in which case its times pi unless etc etc

if you can do this then no simulation or presumably other human being would understand you when you output your results for +2, affirming your "uniqueness". that will at least make you not a simluation

fifferent user here - not OP.

Nope. no reason why in simulation a good AI could not think of a logical contradiction. Point is that when human's do that they know it is a contradiction (once they work it out - often they don't realise they hold contradictory views until it becomes necessary for them to use both ideas at the same time and they then realise that it does not all fit together) So for instance a religious person who needs to build a machine using gears and wheels, and finds that their belief that a circle circumference is three times the diameter of the circle is actually wrong... they then need to revise their contradictory ideas, and reality forces them to adopt Pi. Sadly this does not usually lead them to junk the whole religion, (and the assumption that everything int he bible is true) just the immediately impractical part, and they carry on believing that the bible is utterly correct, even knowing it is isn't.)

actual logical contradictions - where someone believes A and Not A are pretty rare

premise 1 is indefensible because regardless of behavior, something which has X is different from something which doesnt have X

to say they are the same is to say X doesnt exist

but consciousness exists, so those two things are indeed different

the AI issue is whether it can pass the Turing test, hence making that inherent difference ineffective as a matter of functional difference i.e. it doesnt matter if you have consciousness functionally speaking because you cant tell anyway (if the AI has passed the turing test)

but the argument fails because assumption 2 doesnt work, as I pointed out due to instrospection

it is not possible for an AI to actually making a contradiction a true statement

for example in the Wolfram Language

Resolve[Exists[x, x^2

not Op - I don't see how making up a silly set of axioms affirms you are not a simulation. You are assuming that the simulation can only use strict bi-valent logic - why not fuzzy logic? why not have loops that allow random or semi random variation? and also, that the creation of such weird sets of axioms requires some special human- factor - given thet we are just meat machines, why could a metal, or silicon, or photon quantum goodness knows what highly advanced computer not replicate our meat function and be a perfect sim? And in that case, be as conscious as the meat is?

This sounds like Plaro's Allegory of The Cave

you are right in that im assuming its based on the logical foundations now. it is certainly possible that future computation will use "quantum" logic or "fuzzy" logic but it is not probable. so far the foundations of anything other than standard first order logic is shaky. it might be perfected later, that would be interesting, and render my argument weak. but based on current knowledge, it stands.

we are not just meat machines - certain things cannot be reduced to physical matter. qualia for example, the phenomenology of experiencing something which is purely subjective and cannot be reduced to neuroscience.

see Your assumption that machines cannot be conscious is questionable.

there is no difference between the sim and the human (consciousness) - functionally exactly the same, and the difference (meat or machine) is not significant. You say that means conciousness does nto exist - I say it means both are conscious. at that point it is down to definitions and prejudices. this is John Searle's problem - he just assumes that if it isn't meat it isn't thinking.

i didnt say machines cannot be conscious

in fact i even admitted its likely that machines will pass the turing test. but that only entails they exist conscious behavior, not that they are conscious

consciousness can only be affirmed (from current knowledge) through introspection, and hence is totally subjective

the difference between functionally conscious and inherent conscious is critical to the simulation argument

if you can introspectively affirm you are conscious, then the 99.9999% probability of whether you are a simulation is nullified due to the 100% certainty that you are not a simulation because you are inherently, not just functionally, conscious

But chalmers argued that if a computer could be built that replicates function it would also replicate Qualia. Our experience of things as things, as experience of experience, is just an emergent function of the meat machine.

there is no special supernatural consciousness, it is just the way that the meat machine works.

but we now know that the Turing test can be met by complex enough sets of response s stored in huge databases - so it is not a good test of consciousness, merely of how easy it is to fool us - I agree that passing it is only proof of good programming. but having a machine that actually function like a brain - I thinkthat is not far off, and then, consciousness equivalent to ours will emerge.

sadly I have to go to class now - thanks for the intelligent debate! A rarity here!

that argument is completely baseless because qualia cannot be inferred, just like consciousness cannot be inferred

that would be saying if we replicate function we would also replicate consciousness. thats also baseless.

there is absolute no basis for arguing that consciousness or qualia is an emergent property. the most we can say without committing elementary logical blunders is to say that our physical bodies are so far necessary conditions for qualia and csness. we CANNOT say they are the antecedent conditions for the emergence of qualia or csness

have fun at class! im should also take a nap before my seminar...

im super tired and im typing like a retard on my phone please ignore my spelling and grammar

But this is world prime, moron.

ftfy

also checked