I read the wikipedia article, but I just don’t get it…
In: 37
It’s an extension of the brain-in-a-jar thought experiment.
The idea of that is there is no way to tell if you are actually what you think you are (a human with senses experiencing the real world) or a brain in a jar somewhere whose sensory impressions are being piped in with wires or something.
How could you tell the difference if all your tests have to go through the possibly faked senses?
One layer of abstraction back, we have the idea that there aren’t even any senses piped in, just the artificial memory of having seen something. After all, when you “see” something, it isn’t instant – there is a delay while various bits of processing are done to get it into a form your brain can handle.
Ok, so we now have a conscious entity with no real connection to the universe, just memories of it, and can see how its possible to have that experience be indistinguishable from our own.
Peel back the abstraction one layer further – do you need the brain? You could be a simulated brain running on arbitrary physical hardware.
Peel back one step further – does the simulated brain need to be built, or can it spontaneously self assemble? Sounds ridiculously unlikely, and is, but ridiculously unlikely doesn’t mean impossible. In the same way the lottery could be won with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (and that ticket is no less probable than any other), the atoms in the universe could just happen to be arranged in a way that produces a consciousness that is identical to you in this moment.
If you want to go even further, Greg Egan wrote a book called Permutation City that takes time out of the equation. It’s a bit trippy.
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