(September 5, 2013 at 12:13 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:(September 5, 2013 at 11:50 am)pineapplebunnybounce Wrote: Mister Agenda, if we're really living a simulation and manage to contact the users, I doubt they'll believe we're "living". If your character in a game stops responding to your commands and starts talking to you, would you think it's a malfunction or that it became self aware?
Presumably I would KNOW if the characters in my game are self-aware. If they are, aren't I beholden to treat them as people?
This is what I meant by the ethical implications of simulating conscious being on a computer.
In Star Trek: TNG, the holodeck character Moriarty figured out he was in a simulation and caused trouble by messing with the Enterprise. Rather than terminating Moriarty's simulated existence, they dealt with him by deceiving him into thinking he was free of the simulation. It may not have been honest, but it WAS dealing with Moriarty as a real person who had a right to not be summarily deleted or transfomed into a more tractable character.
Oh I agree if objects became self aware we'd need to treat them differently. I meant about us attempting to contact our users or makers, seems unrealistic that they'd take us seriously. We're obviously programmed to behave as if we're self aware if we've been allowed to go on for this long.
But the holodeck character was designed to interact with humans. Meaning it was within its capabilities as a software to detect humans. Computer game characters only interact with other things in the game and our commands delivered with computer language (haha, can you tell i know shit about programming). So if we want to interact with our makers, we'll need to rewrite the program to an extent to give ourselves these new capabilities. And we won't know how to do that if we can't determine if we're a program.
The types of malfunctions in Star Trek (Moriarty and Data's daughter) seem to be minor ones that lead to a new function. But if we're assuming that this is a simulated universe, then it'd require big changes to allow us to see beyond it, no? We'd probably be fixed by maintenance runs before we complete our rewrites.
