baronofheck82

If your imagination, or perhaps some far-future supercomputer, can perfectly simulate intelligence, so that you cannot distinguish between the simulation and reality, are those simulated beings really any less alive and intelligent? Descartes said "I think therefore I am", but what if I only think I'm thinking? Am I still?

There is nothing intelligent about atoms and energy. Conscious intelligence as we understand is an emergent property of a particular arrangement of them. Every night you go to sleep and the conscious, intelligent "you" disappears for a few hours, even though the matter and energy persists (it seems). Then one day you die, and that conscious intelligence disappears forever.

But if intelligence is an emergent property, why should one source of its emergence be more privileged over any other? If it emerges from the silicon of a computer processor, the bits of a computer program, or the abstract imaginative processes of a biological super-intelligence, is it any less real than if it emerged from from a physical clump of neurons? What if a super-intelligent being imagines another intelligent being, or even a whole universe full of them? What if those beings in turn imagine others? Do they all exist? Do none of them?

We begin to see that the nature of intelligent existence is unavoidably independent of base reality. Even if we're a product of your fevered imagination, if your imagination -- or some outside force controlling your perceptions -- is powerful to imbue us with intelligence, then we exist, just as surely as if we were made of physical matter. And since you could be imagined yourself, as a simulation fed to someone else's senses, we see there is no privileged reference frame for intelligent existence. Every intelligence you perceive is as real and unreal as any intelligence can be, and as real and unreal as your own.

I, too, have recently watched The Matrix.

So which pill did you take, red or blue?

Can I take both? I want both.