Lecture 1 Flashcards
(11 cards)
What are the core areas of philosophy and ethics?
- Epistemology: ethics of thought and analysis of knowledge
- what can we know? What is it to know? When is it rational to believe something?
- simulation hypothesis: the hypothesis that, for all we know, we are in a simulation; it is logically consistent with our experiences (isn’t 100% convinced whether life is simulation or not) - Metaphysics: theory of reality
- what is the world like? What kinds of things does it contain? What is fundamental?
- simulation hypothesis: the theory that we are (probably) in a simulation - Philosophy of mind: epistemology and metaphysics of mind
- is the mind the same as the brain? is the mind a ‘program’? does AI have mentality; what about consciousness? do we make ‘free’ choices? can the mind ‘extend’ to artificial objects? - Ethics: ethics of action
- what makes an action right or wrong? what does that? when is something responsible?
What is virtual simulation?
a computer generated model of an event, process, system, action, behavior, or environment
What is a virtual world?
A virtual simulation of a world in which the user will have the experience as of being within, and interacting with that world
What are simulations for?
- model what is happening
- model what could have happened
- model what could happen or could be
What is a perfect simulation?
a simulation that perfectly matches the human experience as of some event or entire ‘life’, such that the user wouldn’t be able to reliably distinguish the simulated world from the non-simulated
What is the simulation hypothesis?
- we are and have always been in an artificially designed perfect simulation of a whole world
- if the simulation hypothesis is true, then what we have always been interacting with, has been constructs of the simulation, something designed by a simulator
- if the simulation hypothesis is true, the neither we are:
- biosims: biological entities outside the simulation but cognitively and physiologically connected to it
- pure sims: wholly artificial entities inside the simulation
What is external world realism?
- we inhabit an ‘external world’: a physical world that is mind-independent; its existence does not depend upon being perceived or believed
- our experiences represent objects with minimal objectivity: they have causal powers, and they seem to persist regardless of changes in our perceptual experiences and beliefs
- our ordinary beliefs are not radically mistaken: many of them are true and amount to knowledge
what are some simulation assumptions?
- substrate independence: human mentality can be fully simulated and artificial. It doesn’t essentially depend on our biology or environment
- techno-optimism: humanity won’t go extinct before ‘post-human’ advancement
- not very risk averse: post-humanity wouldn’t be sufficiently averse to running ancestor simulations
what are cases of sim-blockers?
- impossible/difficult: perfect simulation is impossible or else too hard.
- dualism: the mind is nonphysical. mental states have properties that aren’t reducible to physical states or processes
- substrate dependence: can’t ‘run’ mental states like we do programs -> mental state have non-syntactical properties that are not reducible to computation or input-output functions - there’s a techno-advancement filter: simulators will die off (or hit a ceiling) before such advancement
- there’s a moral filter: simulators will find it too morally problematic.
what are the types of knowledge?
- propositional/’factual’ knowledge
- truth condition: amsterdam in in the netherlands
- belief condition: you believe that amsterdam is in the netherlands
- justification condition: you have ‘good reason’-evidence- to believe that amsterdam is in the netherlands - knowledge by acquaintance
- ability knowledge or ‘know how’
what is the skeptical argument?
P1: if you know that you’re sitting in a classroom, then you know you are not a brain in a vat (BIV) hooked up to a simulation
P2: you don’t know you’re not a BIV
therefore,
C: you don’t know that you’re sitting in a classroom
