There is definitely a difference between a description and a complete description, and, as another commenter pointed out, between a description and a simulation that embodies that description.
Consciousness is a property that we ascribe to ourselves and other entities. We don't experience it in others the way we experience it in ourselves, of course, but we infer it from the data available from interacting with them. They produce a pattern of signals that resonates deeply enough with us that we recognize them as like us in having goals, feelings, and access to the "human experience." For example, one of the most convincing things we could observe an AI do would be to make a novel observation about life, derived from current circumstances, that strikes us as deep and insightful, perhaps because it was hovering at the edge of our own awareness, or because it immediately activates mental patterns that we did not activate but are also meaningfully connected to the situation at hand for us.
It makes sense that if we were to copy the workings of the brain in sufficient detail in a machine, the machine would also be ascribed consciousness by human users. Perhaps we could say that it is an "artificial brain" in a literal sense, performing normal brain functions the way an artificial heart pumps blood.
In the case of the universe, it's at issue whether there is such a thing as a "complete description" of the universe, whether a simulation could be done, and then whether this simulation actually is a universe in some sense. Unlike brains, we don't regularly encounter other universes (actual, physical ones), ones which we don't live in and experience from the inside, but which we are forced to conclude are true manifestations that correspond in every important detail to our own nevertheless. A complete description of the universe by a future physicist (say) would start with a short list of all the types of information that go into describing a particular universe, like a list of type of particles and variables such as position and momentum. This list describes universes in general. Then we'd have to describe a particular universe, with a long, long, long list of all the individual particles and so on. Then we have to represent this information physically in some sort of computer, for the purpose of simulation, and perform the ongoing processing involved in running the simulation.
Finally, we must argue that the simulation is a universe. Not just deserving of being called one, or having the properties typically associated with one, but a true instance of some class that previously had the universe we live in as its single member.
One interesting feature of this line of thought is its seemingly infinite ambition. What about smaller goals we could set for mankind -- might we ever engineer an artificial star? How about an artificial galaxy? We can try to beef up the likelihood of this ever happening by considering not just mankind but any other "intelligent beings" the universe might happen to contain, in the past, present, and future. However, we are again on the shaky ground of inventing a class from a singleton. All extraterrestrial "intelligent beings" ever conceived are just stories with small, structured deviations from the human template; beings we identify with because they, too, have intentions and goals and act in their ultimate self-interest for the purpose of self-preservation and just trying to make a go of it in this big ol' universe. Some of them, it's presumed, make detailed copies of natural things at an astronomical scale and then talk about whether the old thing and the new thing are members of the same class of thing or not.
I agree that it's irrelevant to us and our operation if our brains are made of billiard balls or quantum clouds, and the same seems true of the universe.
It is still interesting whether the universe is "computable" or not, that is, whether something meeting the current definition of a computer could simulate it, even in theory. The part I object to from the OP is the implication we could draw conclusions about the origin of the universe from the prospect of being able to simulate one in theory. I think it's silly or meaningless to say we possibly -- or probably! -- live in an "artificial" universe.
>For example, one of the most convincing things we could observe an AI do would be to make a novel observation about life, derived from current circumstances, that strikes us as deep and insightful, perhaps because it was hovering at the edge of our own awareness, or because it immediately activates mental patterns that we did not activate but are also meaningfully connected to the situation at hand for us.
I think you've come much closer than I to getting a definition of consciousness, but I still don't find it satisfactory. You could have a computer mimic a human without actually having anything resembling an inner "human experience". For example, a giant look up table with a preprogrammed response to any possible input. We have created extremely simple versions of this that are almost effective enough to pass the turing test. Just by gather a large number of human responses to chatbots. Though you could say the process that creates the giant look up table is intelligent, the table itself obviously is not.
There are AIs like AIXI which could be vastly intelligent without reasonably being considered conscious. They don't actually "think" so much as brute-force every possible solution to a given problem, or every possible explanation for a series of inputs, etc. Given enough computing power this would actually be effective. You could then ask it to mimic a conscious being and it could do so easily (given either a definition of consciousness or a set of observations about other conscious beings.) Maybe doing that requires the intelligence to actually simulate a conscious process somewhere along the line, so I don't know if that counts. It may be able to do so through mere, without having to actually run a full simulation. Providing a "deep insight" about life is nowhere near as complicated as a full human consciousness.
Maybe there is no such thing as consciousness. In the sense that there is no simple way to define it that is fully consistent with everything we want it to mean. That there are always going to be arbitrary seeming exceptions and gray areas. But that has deep and disturbing implications for morality. Maybe it's not relevant to our day to day life, but if we ever want to program a friendly artificial intelligence, we are screwed.
>I think it's silly or meaningless to say we possibly -- or probably! -- live in an "artificial" universe.
Well assuming that there are more simulated beings in all of existence, whatever that means, than there are non-simulated ones, it is very likely we are simulations. Though it's impossible to know what exists beyond our own universe. What is the distribution of universes? Do 50% of universes allow for infinite computing power, for example? What programming language do they use, which would determine how many bits a given universe would take to specify in that language, and therefore how often it gets simulated? How many universes even have anything close to intelligent beings?
An infinitely powerful computer would allow you to simulate every possible universe all at once, instantly (you would also be able to simulate every possible branch of non-deterministic universes, continuous variables, time travelling, and other things that people claim makes the universe "uncomputable.) And you could instantly do it an infinite number of times. If it were possible for such a thing to exist in a universe, that universe would contain every other possible universe. Including copies of itself and others universes with infinite computing power, which would contain more universes, etc.
So what is the top level universe? Why does something exist rather than nothing? Perhaps everything that can exist does exist. Maybe every computable program has been (is being?) run, including one that specifies our universe. That's the simplest possible explanation that explains the existence of the universe. Though I can not wrap my head around why something exists rather than nothing. None of this has any practical implications for our daily life, and the answer is probably unknowable, but it bothers me.
Sorry for going off on such a tangent. I hope this is comprehensible, as I know philosophical writings rarely are.
Consciousness and intelligence: You're right that proving something is "conscious" does seem difficult or impossible. Making something that is merely "intelligent," on the other hand, may be easy, depending on how you define the word. I think that's because consciousness is something we experience in ourselves, looking inwards, marveling at what it means that we are a mind living in a body, while intelligence is something we ascribe to other things in varying degrees if they exhibit certain behaviors. It follows that for us to consider something else to be conscious, we have to have that same feeling as when we experience our own consciousness, but via identification with something else (a robot or AI). We have to be like, "Wow, consciousness," and then be like, "Oh, that's not me, that's him!" It's the same way for intelligence, but it's a much broader term because there are many kinds of intelligence. Animals exhibit a lot of intelligence, as do some computer systems. In both cases (consciousness and intelligence), I think making systems that we recognize as more intelligent and more conscious involves understanding the brain and replicating its various functionality (since it's brains that will be making the call; it's brains that encode the distinction; the rest of the universe doesn't care). As we learn more about consciousness, we may be able to identify it as a particular kind of intelligence. For example, it may basically be the small part of our brain that directs our attention and awareness from moment to moment and decides what computational tasks to take on, while the rest of the brain is basically a large set of elaborate coprocessors specialized for different types of computation.
Simulated universes: I still think this is all meaningless metaphor. It's not easy to articulate why, but I'll try.
Some lines of thought just combine ideas in deep ways, but don't actually tell you anything new. For example, Zeno's paradox -- to get from point A to point B, you have to first go halfway, then halfway again, and so on forever -- doesn't actually teach us that nothing can ever go from point A to point B. It just demonstrates a glitch in the metaphors we use to reason about time and space. Actually, it's a glitch in the metaphor of traversing space as achieving a goal. Normally, if reaching a particular goal involves an infinite to-do list of subgoals, we wouldn't expect to ever get to the end and actually achieve the goal. However, if the goal is traversing some infinitely subdividable interval of space, we are provided with a mechanism to generate an infinite list of subgoals that are presumably all involved in achieving the larger goal. It's all just mental gymnastics and the normal tools of intuition breaking down.
To take a closer example, consider this line of thinking: "If you pick a random marriage proposal, chances are it is an imagined one rather than an actual one, because for every actual marriage proposal there are on average two or more imagined ones that never came to pass." This strange kind of thinking also mashes together diverse intuitive concepts. There's the idea that every class of thing (like "marriage proposal") has an extension set, an ensemble of instances. There's the fiction that an "event" is a discrete thing that we could identify and count if we had to, like counting the number of thoughts I've had today ("a thought" is a singular noun after all). There's the concept from probability theory of picking a member at random from a set (with the presumption that this is a well-defined act). There's the idea that an imagined X is still an X, because we still call it one. Unicorns are still unicorns even if they don't happen to exist.
The most intellectual, abstract part of the brain has a tendency to focus on what could possibly be rather than what is. We can get so wrapped up in generalities that we forget that this is the universe -- what we see around us, not what we imagine or are capable of conceiving of. Statements like, "Perhaps everything that can exist does exist" sound to me like a projection of our own models of reality out onto reality. Similarly, it's fascinating that we can conceptualize and talk about infinite computing power, but that doesn't mean there is any reality to it.
Consciousness is a property that we ascribe to ourselves and other entities. We don't experience it in others the way we experience it in ourselves, of course, but we infer it from the data available from interacting with them. They produce a pattern of signals that resonates deeply enough with us that we recognize them as like us in having goals, feelings, and access to the "human experience." For example, one of the most convincing things we could observe an AI do would be to make a novel observation about life, derived from current circumstances, that strikes us as deep and insightful, perhaps because it was hovering at the edge of our own awareness, or because it immediately activates mental patterns that we did not activate but are also meaningfully connected to the situation at hand for us.
It makes sense that if we were to copy the workings of the brain in sufficient detail in a machine, the machine would also be ascribed consciousness by human users. Perhaps we could say that it is an "artificial brain" in a literal sense, performing normal brain functions the way an artificial heart pumps blood.
In the case of the universe, it's at issue whether there is such a thing as a "complete description" of the universe, whether a simulation could be done, and then whether this simulation actually is a universe in some sense. Unlike brains, we don't regularly encounter other universes (actual, physical ones), ones which we don't live in and experience from the inside, but which we are forced to conclude are true manifestations that correspond in every important detail to our own nevertheless. A complete description of the universe by a future physicist (say) would start with a short list of all the types of information that go into describing a particular universe, like a list of type of particles and variables such as position and momentum. This list describes universes in general. Then we'd have to describe a particular universe, with a long, long, long list of all the individual particles and so on. Then we have to represent this information physically in some sort of computer, for the purpose of simulation, and perform the ongoing processing involved in running the simulation.
Finally, we must argue that the simulation is a universe. Not just deserving of being called one, or having the properties typically associated with one, but a true instance of some class that previously had the universe we live in as its single member.
One interesting feature of this line of thought is its seemingly infinite ambition. What about smaller goals we could set for mankind -- might we ever engineer an artificial star? How about an artificial galaxy? We can try to beef up the likelihood of this ever happening by considering not just mankind but any other "intelligent beings" the universe might happen to contain, in the past, present, and future. However, we are again on the shaky ground of inventing a class from a singleton. All extraterrestrial "intelligent beings" ever conceived are just stories with small, structured deviations from the human template; beings we identify with because they, too, have intentions and goals and act in their ultimate self-interest for the purpose of self-preservation and just trying to make a go of it in this big ol' universe. Some of them, it's presumed, make detailed copies of natural things at an astronomical scale and then talk about whether the old thing and the new thing are members of the same class of thing or not.
I agree that it's irrelevant to us and our operation if our brains are made of billiard balls or quantum clouds, and the same seems true of the universe.
It is still interesting whether the universe is "computable" or not, that is, whether something meeting the current definition of a computer could simulate it, even in theory. The part I object to from the OP is the implication we could draw conclusions about the origin of the universe from the prospect of being able to simulate one in theory. I think it's silly or meaningless to say we possibly -- or probably! -- live in an "artificial" universe.