Sentient Worlds or just Data Nodes?

Posted on September 5, 2007
Filed Under Society, Consciousness |

A world within a world has been the theme of science fiction for a long time now. The US Department of Defense has made it a reality in the form of a global simulation inside a computer system. The project aims to create a map of civilization, and perhaps even create predictions of future events based upon collected data.

“The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.”

Sentient Worlds

Simulation of World

How far this can realistically be taken is obviously open to debate, but it also opens up the debate on the nature of human consciousness. Materialistic-science still holds to the belief that a human is merely a collection of vast amounts of data. That would tend to imply that if that data was recreated, then you would effectively have an exact replica of a human. Naturally that discounts any notions of something “more” to a our existence. The real point however, is we don’t know precisely how and when that elemental spark comes into play. Perhaps if a computer node was developed that is complex enough - then it too would end up being more than the sum of its parts. That is, if we work on the notion that consciousness arises from the complexity of the object.

“Social science in both its positivist and interpretive forms has reflected the metaphysical assumptions of classical physics since the 19th century, when many prominent political philosophers, economists, and sociologists tried self-consciously to ground their nascent disciplines on physics. The effect of this worldview has been clearest on positivist social science, where man is now routinely seen as a “machine.” If man is a machine, then like any body in motion studied by classical physics, his behavior will be deterministic and law-governed, and can be studied in an objective, third-person way that has no need to take consciousness into account. Interpretive social scientists reject the machine model of man and objectivist ways of knowing in favor of a first-person perspective that makes consciousness central. But their approach too is indebted to classical physics, since they have taken the latter as their reference for what it means to study society “scientifically.” I argue that this has led many interpretivists to implicitly accept an untenable Cartesian dualism of mind and body, and to reject the idea of social science altogether.

If consciousness is a quantum rather than classical mechanical phenomenon, then these fundamental parameters of contemporary social scientific discourse will be undermined. Man will not be a machine, nor will his behavior be explainable in purely deterministic and objective terms. On the other hand, neither will this entail a Cartesian dualism or the impossibility of social “science.” Contrary to both orthodoxies, the “ultimate” science, quantum physics, would establish the importance of consciousness for the scientific study of social life, and point toward a radical rethinking of man and society.”

Quantum Consciousness

To start with the DOD’s simulation is just that, a simulation. A collection of data attempting to mirror reality. A virtual world. To push the theoretical a bit further; the movie “Thirteenth Floor” was about a simulated world inside a computer system, but as in such popular science fiction the world became sentient, containing residents of Artificial Intelligence.

But intelligence alone does not constitute self-awareness or consciousness. Algorithms can produce extremely complex, predictive as well as random behavior. Such constructs can even act in a relatively intelligent manner. AI currently can mimic certain levels of life. In the future such AI may evolve to the point where - on an intellectual level - it is indistinguishable from the human.

But will it have that elemental spark? When does AI become conscious? And seeing as Artificial Consciousness is an oxymoron, any being that developed consciousness would have to be considered fully alive.

The question then, is how effective can a computer simulation of earth and its populations be, without taking human consciousness into the equation?