Generally not up so early but my brain went off on a tangent and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I started writing things down and eventually came up with this:
What do you think about 4 dimensional beings? They would be someone or some people who could see our entire observable universe at once from either the big picture or zooming down to the atomic level. Not just the current view of our universe, but all the past and future up to the end point (if there’s an end point, which I will argue there must be) I think 4 dimensional beings are pretty cool, we could be one very soon ourselves if we try.
Consider this: We have the ability to create artificial environments and impose laws (physics) in them. We have the ability to create an artificial intelligence which learns and grows. If we were to create a 3d space (a bedroom for example), a 3d person and give it a goal to put a block through a block shaped hole, we would be able to watch it grow and learn until it completes its task or fails. We would be able to save that file and load it as many times as we wanted changing variables in each environment to entertain us such as removing the block and eventually watching the AI go through an existential crisis.
We could interact with this environment by zooming out and seeing the whole room or zooming in to see the building blocks of our AI character. Seeing the room through the point of view of the AI character, seeing its thoughts and frustrations, moving freely with our camera through walls and objects and also skipping ahead or backtracking to a point of time in the file allowing it to play in our concept of ‘real time’.
The AI character would never know we exist because it is in another dimension from us. We can see through its entire ‘life’ from any position in the time or space of its reality. From our perspective as the creators we are its God, this AI characters life is trivial and would become boring to us rather quickly.
What if there were more than 1 character in the file though. What if we built a virtual world for our AI in which interesting relationships develop between its inhabitants and we watch them build, fight, love, and explore? Their ‘lives’ could run their courses and then we could view the results afterwards, skipping around to the interesting parts. By making small changes we could get totally different outcomes from that point forward. Our file has an end but the characters within couldn’t know that. We know that all of their futures are determined already but with so much interplay between our characters we could spend an infinite amount of time tweaking little things to change the file for that copy only.
If we gave it enough time and resources to the AI in the file, I believe it would conclude that its existence is being viewed by something it cannot see (a creator or God). The way it could prove the a God exists would be to become a God itself. The God to the ‘AI metaverse’ in which it creates its own universe for itself just as we have done for it. This process would continue indefinitely. If you would argue that being the god of the AI metaverse would be trivial, it would equally as trivial as a god to us.
The question becomes: Could we bring one of our AI characters into our plane of existence? Could the AI escape its universe on its own? How can we be brought into our creators plane? Would we even want to go there? I think that we could bring the AI out of its file so long as it had something in our plane to inhabit, a robot body for example. What mentality would our AI have if we allowed it to transcend to a God? Is the ‘human spirit’ in our fleshy bodies placed there by an unknown entity comparable to an AI ‘soul’ uploaded to a robot body by us? In our case we know we are the creator but we do not know what creates us.
What incentives could the AI give us to persuade us to allow it to join our dimension? If we had that answer, could we apply it to our reality as well?
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