Simulationism answers the Hard Problem of Consciousness
The "OMG, it's so hard" problem
The “hard problem” of consciousness was labeled as such by David Chalmers in the early nineties, but has been thought and written on at least since Plato and Aristotole (as “perception” because nobody was using the word “qualia” back then).
Briefly, the hard problem is why and how physical processes give rise to subjective experience.
We can explain that items exist of a certain measurable wavelength, and that photons hit our retinas, exciting cones sensitive to those wavelengths, which then sets off various neurons firing in the brain…
But ultimately, how does that turn into me actually experiencing that I’m seeing a plum floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat?
Why does experiencing something FEEL like something?
Qualia is that “experiencing something” - the experience of experience.
For instance, dogs, mice, insects, bacteria - they all take in info from the outside environment and act on it. Many people might suspect or suggest that as you get to those lower reaches of insects and bacteria, they’re probably not having qualia while doing so, but we can’t know, because there’s no way to *measure* qualia.
Philosophers have posited P-zombies, which are people just like you and me, indistinguishable to the outside eye or by interaction, that act exactly the same as any other human by any standard, but which don’t have qualia internally. How could we know?
I mean, we can speculate, but that’s all we can do. That’s why it’s the hard problem.
But I’ve got a solution for you! Or at least some food for thought.
Simulationism is the belief that our reality is simulated by unknown higher minds or entities.
Some of the arguments for this prospect:
The universe is quantized. Nothing can be seen or measured (even theoretically) below the Planck distance, there is a smallest “tick” of time (the time it takes light to cross the Planck distance), there is a smallest quanta of energy, and so on. You know how you can only zoom into a photograph or movie only so far before it becomes pixelated? Quantized? Funny that our reality is limited the same way, almost as though simulating full-depth space, time, and energy was too computationally expensive.
Our universe existing at all is extremely dependent on getting a number of “universal constants” juuuuusssssttt right. If they weren’t all right to within a tolerance of many decimal places, our universe wouldn’t exist, wouldn’t have clumps of matter in it, wouldn’t have stars in it, wouldn’t have planets in it, wouldn’t have life in it, and so on.
The universe is huge, but conveniently set up so it’s expanding fast enough that most of it is “outside of our light cone” and so the vast majority of it is unreachable and doesn’t have to be rendered from our POV.
If ANY sentient beings advance like we’ve been doing, but for millions or billions of years, their computational capacity will be so significant that simulating other universes / worlds / minds is going to be fairly trivial. And if advanced beings are in the habit of doing this, there will likely be a LOT of simulations. But if this is true, then the odds of any given universe / world / mind being a simulation is signifcant - there will always be many more “simulated realities” than “base realities,” so the odds of any given universe being a simulation is actually greater.
Our universe seems to run on math. We’ll discover or invent whole reams of math, and later find that it perfectly describes how spacetime curves in the presence of matter and energy, or some such. And this happens *everywhere,* in all domains of life and existence, repeatedly. Ridiculous! Almost as if our universe was made of code or something, and they just plugged in existing libraries and functions that are maximally elegantly compressed, and can unfold into certain universal configurations.
Not just that, from Zheng and Meister, The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s? (2024) - our entire perceptual lives are extremely rate-limited, to the extent that “even if a person soaks up information at the perceptual limit of a Speed Card champion [18 b/s, twice the human average], does this 24 hours a day without sleeping, and lives for 100 years, they will have acquired approximately <=4 GB of data.” The fact that our entire perceptual lives fit easily in a trivial handful of GB is a strong argument that we’re simulated, IMO.
The Fermi Paradox - honestly, if WE exist, so should a bunch of other alien species, but we’ve seen no signs of them, or their media, or any significant stellar engineering, and so on.
“That time a bunch of tarted up savannah apes accidentally invented a god using tricky sand and electricity” just seems like the sort of thing that’s fairly likely to get simulated, right? I mean, I’D watch that documentary.
But then we get to the final argument - qualia ITSELF is a potential piece of evidence!
After all, WE make TV shows, and computer games, and little “simulations” of people all the time, right? But what’s the main difference? They’re just acting stuff out - there’s no THERE there.
Qualia is the THERE.
I suggest that qualia is something like a first-person “hook” to our Simulators.
I mean, let’s just think about why WE make our “simulations,” crude though they are. To entertain us, to educate us, to tell a story well, to communicate ideas that are more nuanced or fun than text captures well.
But what would we ultimately like out of our entertainment? What’s the ideal end state?
Being able to fully inhabit a body and point of view, in a different (simulated) environment and scenario. We would like to BE the qualia in our entertainment, in other words!
There’s a good chance we’ll get there, with technologies like Neuralink and the like. And if it’s possible and we *are* a simulation, it’s a good bet that our simulators got there too, and we are IT. Our qualia is that hook to the “outside universe,” so they can come down and inhabit whatever point of view they want to, from the first person.
And so, we can finally explain WHY experiencing something “feels” like something - it’s the logical end state for simulated beings to “feel things being experienced.”
What would this mean?
Well, I’ve always been attracted to Simulationism because if it’s true, we have a literal moral duty to live really varied and interesting lives.
This is because the vast majority of things we simulate is for entertainment purposes, and would we really expect the dynamics to be so different for other beings? Even educational games and movies and histories and documentaries are better the more entertaining they are.
What’s that? Entertainment is a matter of aesthetics, and there’s no way to map insect aesthetics to god aesthetics? Sure - unless the simulation was literally created to align with god-esthetics, which is overwhelming likely if Simulationism is true.
So qualia feeling like something just makes it more likely that it’s morally important to be entertaining!
All of you people living boring, repetitive lives? You’re sinners, and you’re putting us all at risk of getting canceled in favor of the universe about networked gas giant intelligences with poor pangalactic sphincter control!
Cut it out!
Not only do you only get one life, making it boring is a sin against yourself and everyone around you!
And the best part - living an interesting life is something you should be trying to do ALREADY, for yourself - it just comes with even more positive externalities in this paradigm!
Which brings us to the next plausible theological conclusion…
The “hard” problem might also be a HARD problem, if you know what I mean…
With winks and eyebrow waggles.
That’s right, I’m talking about the possibility that our universe is a pornography simulator!
Our rightful caliph, Scott Alexander, has written about this before.
Broadly, a LOT of our simulations are actually pornography, a special case of “entertainment.” Arguably, it drove most of the internet’s global expansion and adoption!
But let me make the full argument:
As Scott pointed out, sure, we’re not all having sex all the time, but obviously, the creation of porn even within-our-own-universe requires a lot of auxiliary things like sets and actors and actresses and scheduling and coordination and economics, right?
I mean, porn is actually on top of a really big technology pyramid. We had to invent economics, and image capturing technology, and one-to-many communication mediums, and who knows what else to even get to the point we were producing porn, how far off from that is needing to seed a simulated universe to get there?
Next, consider the level of effort that’s gone into sex in our own universe! First, for the last 2B years, literally every single organism has been obsessed with it, and essentially tries their best to stay alive and achieve things all towards the terminal end of “more sex.”
Then even after we have societies and technology, we’re STILL obsessed with sex. We all know what 90% of the internet was about for most of its life. Entire global communication mediums were created just to propagate and multiply the instances of sex in the world! Entire technology pyramids!
This isn’t the best part, either. So in theory every life form is *completely* obsessed with sex for 2 billion years because it’s how our deep time optimization engine (evolution) works. You need it to get descendants, you need sexually-reproduced descendants to tweak the parameters a little and optimize towards the current environment, and you repeat this over 2 billion years to keep everyone relevant for tackling the problems of the day.
But now! Now there’s a Fertility Crisis!
The rollout of high speed internet and higher standards of living has largely correlated with *drops* in fertility everywhere, contrary to what we’d expect.
Sex was the whole story for 2 billion years because it ended in babies, but now we’re just like “screw the babies, let’s just focus on maximizing the portrayals of sex here on all our TV shows and movies and internet! So *what* if we become extinct??”
Tell me that's not a sign sex is given supremely unnatural primacy in this reality!
In the developed world, the one that created the internet and many shows, and now AI (which is with 100% certainty going to be used in sex bots as one of the first major use cases), fertility is below replacement. First Worlders are literally going extinct, because we’re focusing more energies on maximizing the amount of sex everywhere instead of the putative end sex was ABOUT for 2 billion years.
Okay, okay. But - per Scott again - the other reason our universe isn’t just us having sex all the time, is that the people in the universe that’s simulating us, our gods or universe primes or whatever? They’re obviously more prudish and puritanical than us.
How do we know this? Because they *accomplish* things. Because they literally created a whole universe, us, to generate their porn for them - they’re obviously a little deeper and smarter than us, require a little bit more foreplay and plausibility and causative chains, to really get off on any given two people having sex. We’re their “wild degenerates.”
Because look at our OWN porn! You can’t even get a pizza delivered in porn-universe! They can’t get anything done, because they’re so horny they’re ripping each other’s clothes off before anyone can pay for or eat a pizza!
So, therefore, we are to the universe-builders as our porno-denizens are to us: the less prudish, more horny versions of themselves that they’ve imagined, so they could live out the fantasy of doing less stuff (and more doing of each other).
But not infinitely less: in our own porn universes, we leave in enough foreplay for the people to at least order the pizzas, even if they never eat them. We're not so degenerate that we imagine people getting overcome with lust just because they made eye contact! That would be the porn made in our porn’s universe, and it would never get made except by us making it at a meta-level - a porn about porn-producers, who keep trying to make “eye contact then sex” porn, but keep getting irresistably distracted by their horniness and attractive coworkers and having sex instead of producing it.
Let’s take that argument back one level now.
Our primes’ version of degenerate is "enough foreplay to invent the Internet" -- at which point everything else rapidly fades away, job done, now our society focuses primarily on producing sex in various mediums and in real life, even while we’re going extinct because nobody has babies.
We're living through the time of population decline and secular stagnation, because all that other stuff we were doing was just "ordering the pizza", and now the pizza boy is here.
Other supporting evidence:
People are obsessed with status. Why? Because it gets them better sex partners (in universe).
But OUT-universe, it’s because it concentrates the sex-havers.
Historically, across all of time, genetic analysis of mitochondrial and Y chromosome DNA tells us that 80% of women have bred, but only 40% of men have. To put this another way, sex has been *unnaturally concentrated,* as in, if you were following a given male character, and you knew what to look for, that character would be having twice the amount of sex you’d expect, especially given that everyone is strongly motivated to seek it, so on priors, you’d expect a bell curve rather than a zero-inflated distribution. But we get the zero-inflated distribution!
So civilization happened for a while (5-10k years out of ~2M as hunter gathering hominins with big brains), and they invented monogamy, which you know, was great for civilizational stability and technological advancement. I think we probably got up to ~80% of men having sex under monogamous regimes. But that was really only necessary until we invented the internet and apps.
Dating apps as evidence.
NOW, the invention of dating apps has concentrated all the sex still more!
First from 80% of men to only 20%:
Now that Match Group has spread its sinister claws across the land, darkening and blighting everything in its path, making everything a Tinder clone, women now consider only the top 5% of men:
Do you see what’s going on? Concentrating all the female attention, and thus all the sex, into a smaller and smaller proportion of men?
Don’t you think that’s a little unlikely? And both sides complain about it, pretty much nonstop! But it’s still happening.
Now this concentration has obvious problems for both sides, right? If you approach this as a “I want to be happily partnered or married” perspective, it’s nuts for both sides! These 5% of guys getting all the attention aren’t going to want to settle down! They’re going to want to enjoy it! By having a lot of sex!!
But does that make it way way easier and more fun to dip in and watch the show? Our universe? You better believe it!
So everyone complains, nobody is happy except that top 5% of guys.
But from an “actually, the universe was designed to maximize legible sex, not marriages or babies” perspective? Makes perfect sense!
I will keep what this implies about your moral duty unspoken for now.
But you know, having more sex and more energetic, inventive, and intense sex was PROBABLY a good move anyways, even without a bone-deep moral obligation?
Let me make a Pascalian Wager with you
The old Pascal’s Wager is tired and lame - infinite suffering? Infinite heaven? We know you’re just playing games with infinities, Blaise!
Let’s make a payoff matrix:
This particular Pascalian Wager seems like a slam dunk, to me?
No matter the probability you chose, whether Simulationism is true or false, the right move is to try to live a more interesting life, and the wrong move is to live an unchanged, boring and repetitive life.
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting you eschew whatever current moral framework you’re operating by - we are not so sure of ourselves that “interesting” is the highest teleological good, above the Golden Rule, consideration of others, civilizational norms, being an example for our children or other people, and so on. We certainly shouldn’t prioritize “interesting” at the expense of offending our current morals or mores - but I think we both know we all have a LOT of headroom to crank “interesting” higher from wherever it is now while still being moral.
There is an argument to be made that if we're in a simulation and humans are the main focus then this could be a porn sim. In that case, I would guess that it's not just the act that is being mined by the sim masters but all the time that humans spend thinking about sex. That's one guess, I would venture another guess that what is being mined from our sim is simply whatever humans will spend most of their time doing throughout our entire biological history. It could be sex or it could be a lot of other things. It could be something in the future that we haven't started doing yet. (By 'mined' I just mean the purpose of the sim, if there is one).