Look forward to the future

If you don’t believe me, let me persuade you. If you’ve never heard it then I’m going to do you a massive favour. I think this is a driving tune, so get in your car and turn up the volume. If you don’t have a car, headphones will do, but this song deserves to be played a little louder than normal.

I understand that the band Heart doesn’t like this song because of the message it conveys, and they no longer perform it live. I think that’s a shame. It’s true that the message is pretty awful, but to me that’s what makes it powerful.

“Under the bridge” by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers is about doing heroine, which is also a pretty awful message, but it’s still a great song. Songs should be complicated and explore the darker nature of the human soul.

Although it was released in 1990, to me this is the classic 80s rock sound. This song epitomises “soft rock” or “rock ballad” or “power ballad” for me and it does everything right (just like the lonely boy in the song). The key changes, the screaming guitars, the driving baseline, the powerful drums but most of all, the story combine to create the single greatest song ever recorded.

If you’re familiar with this song, just think about the lyrics for a moment. What goes on in the lines of this song is mind blowing. It’s really weird that this song was commercially successful considering the content.

This is a song about a woman who has sex with strangers, hoping to become pregnant because for whatever reason her husband is unable to impregnate her. During the song, she meets a stranger, takes him to a hotel room, has sex with him and then skips out before he wakes up. Some time later he discovers that he has a child to this strange woman, and the whole truth comes out.

Just think about that for a moment, that’s a crazy premise for a song to be based on. The woman is heartless, in that she doesn’t seem to be interested in the stranger’s feelings at all, but I think a more sympathetic reading is required. I think that the for the woman in the song, time is running out for her to become pregnant. If we consider the situation from her point of view, it’s not inconceivable that one would go to such lengths to have a baby. People regularly pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for IVF. It makes me wonder whether this is what women were forced to do before IVF became commonplace.

I view the “lonely boy” – The stranger in this song as being pretty much innocent. Young men are driven by sex and will rarely refuse it. She offered him sex and he enthusiastically agreed.

The woman, I have mixed feelings about. One cannot begrudge her the feminist ideal of being 100% in control of her own reproduction, that seems laudable, but the way she goes about getting pregnant is pretty abhorrent. She doesn’t seem to care for the stranger at all, she just wants his superior genetics and sperm. When you balance these two viewpoints, she’s a bit of a monster, but I admire her for doing what she feels she has to do, even if it’s wrong.

Let us go over all the lyrics in turn, line by line:

It was a rainy night when he came into sight
Standing by the road, no umbrella, no coat

The man is never given a name in this song, more about that later, but I think it’s important. The whole point of this song, right from the very start, is that the man is not particularly relevant to the woman’s experience.

These two lines at the beginning set up the story. It allows for some doubt on the part of the listener. Did she spot the man in rain and take pity, or is this a hunting strategy?

So I pulled up along side and I offered him a ride

I like to think there is a double entendre at play here, because she offers to drive him, but also, you know, she wants to have sex with him.

He accepted with a smile so we drove for a while

Of course he accepted, it’s raining, clearly this is a man in need of a lift and a kindly woman with a warm car. At this point the “boy” is innocent, he has no idea what’s in store for him

I didn’t ask him his name, this lonely boy in the rain

She didn’t ask him his name because it’s not relevant to her devious ulterior motive. It’s not about companionship or even sex for her, it’s about something much bigger. She doesn’t need his name, she needs his sperm. I think this indicates the selfishness of the woman, both towards the lonely boy and to the other man (more about him later). She didn’t even bother to find out the name of her potential baby’s father – she might be a sociopath.

Fate tell me it’s right, is this love at first sight

For me this line is complicated, we find out later in the song that love is not the motive here, but could it be that the physical attraction she feels to the lonely boy in the rain is the same as the attraction she feels to the other man, and therefore would this lonely boy suit her needs – Hence – “Fate tell me it’s right” – This lonely boy will become perhaps the second most important person in her life, as the father of her child, even though she will never see him again, it’s important that she get’s it right

Please don’t make it wrong, just stay for the night

Again this harkens back to the innocence of the boy. From the later lyrics we can assume that the woman is married, perhaps the boy is protesting, something like “but you’re married…?” and she’s trying to persuade him to sleep with her anyway. I think this is the closest we get to her showing remorse for how she treats the “lonely boy”. She must know that what she’s doing is wrong, but she needs to accomplish her goal.

Chorus:

All I want to do is make love to you
Say you will you want me too
All I want to do is make love to you
I’ve got lovin’ arms to hold on to

There isn’t much subtext here. It’s pretty clear that she wants to have sex with the boy, but it’s important to her to get his consent. This is somewhat laughable once we know her true intent, and we are absolutely certain that there wasn’t a condom involved.

She didn’t ask his consent to father her child, only to have sex. I think there is a clear line between those two things that she should have identified. Some people might say that making children is the whole point of having sex, but by 1990 I think at least some people were doing it for fun as well (obviously this is sarcasm, it’s always been fun).

If asked the question: “Do you want to make a baby with me?” Most young men would say no, unless they were drunk. If it’s a question of simply having sex “Do you want to have sex with me” or, to paraphrase, “Say you will, you want me too”, most young men would happily agree. This is why we have informed consent – to make sure that someone is aware of all the facts before they agree to something.

The last line is not only meant to persuade, but I think also to indicate a teaching or caring role in this one night relationship. She is telling the lonely boy that she will guide him through the experience. I think this tells us that the woman is quite a bit older than the “boy”. I think she must be mid thirties, and the boy might be under 20. She is the dominant partner in the relationship. She doesn’t have to be that much older, but I can imagine the pressure of the biological time bomb forcing her to make unpalatable decisions so that she can get pregnant before it’s too late.

So we found this hotel, it was a place I knew well

This suggests that she’s been picking up lonely boys by the side of the road for some time. If she’s in her mid thirties and wants to become pregnant, time is running out for her (especially in the 80s or early 90s). She doesn’t want to be an older mum, and she doesn’t want complications. Maybe she’s been doing it for years, or maybe just the last year or so. Even so, I think we can understand from this line that this isn’t the second or even third time at this hotel, she’s a frequent guest.

We made magic that night. Oh, he did everything right

I’m no romantic, but I think this means he was good at doing sex. She obviously enjoyed it. Makes me wonder whether I “do everything right”. I think that compared to the lonely boy I probably don’t stack up very well.

He brought the woman out of me, so many times, easily

This is my favourite line to sing in the shower, there’s a bit of a key change. It needs to be shouted loud. I’m pretty sure this line shows that he was easily able to bring her to orgasm multiple times.

And in the morning when he woke all I left him was a note

By the look of this line, I think she leaves the hotel and goes on her way long before he wakes up. The song doesn’t relate whether or not the woman paid for the hotel room, or left the lonely boy to pick up the tab in the morning. I like to think that she paid everything for him, but knowing the way she behaves, I wouldn’t be surprised if she stuck him with the bill. Anyway, before she leaves, she writes him a biologically confusing note:

I told him I am the flower you are the seed
We walked in the garden we planted a tree
Don’t try to find me, please don’t you dare
Just live in my memory, you’ll always be there

It’s kind of self explanatory, but also it isn’t. I think what she’s trying to say is that she has an egg, and he has a sperm, and through last night’s actions both egg and sperm have combined to become a zygote. I am the flower, you are the seed, we walked in the garden, we planted a tree is not how all this works at all, however I’m willing to forgive for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s difficult to make biology rhyme – You work with what you have
2. The song is written from the point of view of the woman. We don’t know her level of education or whether she’s a biologist, so it’s understandable that she might not be entirely clear on the process, but she gets the gist of it. And she made it rhyme , so I can forgive

The next lines of the note are much more clear, don’t try to find me, I’ll always remember you.

Because the song is written from the woman’s point of view, she has told the boy to not bother looking for her. Little did she know that in all likelihood, the boy had absolutely no intention of looking her up. It could present a problem if he later finds that he has an STD and needs to contact his previous partners, but he has been told not to, so that’s that.

I don’t think many young men try to trace previous partners on the off chance that they have a previously unknown child, in fact I think that’s the exact opposite of what 99% of young men are interested in finding out.

She could have got away with it by simply leaving with no note, which I think would have made more sense, especially to the lonely boy. Leaving the note was a especially cruel to me, because now the lonely boy will find his mind wandering about a child that was taken from him, that he can never meet or raise – For a more sensitive soul this would be torture. Because of the aforementioned nods towards the innocence of the lonely boy earlier, I choose to believe that this note made him bitter.

She basically says: You’ve made me pregnant, don’t try to find me, I’ll always remember you. This is a pretty heartless thing to do. She has no idea what he thinks about fatherhood, she didn’t get a medical history to discover whether he’s likely to pass on any congenital defects etc. It might be that natural selection is doing all the work here, in that she finds the boy attractive, and traditionally that is a good signifier of genetic fitness.

Chorus again – no point in going over it

Break:

Oh, oooh, we made love
Love like strangers
All night long
We made love

I’ve heard it said that strangers have better sex because they are more adventurous. I don’t know if it’s true. Either way, these lines tell us that they had sex all night. From the lonely boy’s point of view this was probably awesome. From the woman’s point of view, she just wanted to be absolutely certain that she got as much sperm out of him as possible to maximise the possibility of pregnancy.

Then it happened one day, we came round the same way

So it looks as though at some point in the future they meet each other again. They are very lucky to recognise each other, but then that’s just my own experience, I’m terrible with faces. Anyway, by chance, they bump into each other.

You can imagine his surprise when he saw his own eyes

This lyric implies that the woman is travelling with her child, the offspring of their union. The man is perceptive enough to recognise the child as his own! I find this unlikely, but let’s say the man has some distinctive feature or other that was genetically propagated to the next generation. The song mentions eyes – so he must have distinctive eyes.

So the “lonely boy” is surprised at having met his own child that he didn’t know he had. I’ll bet he was surprised! That would surprise me too.

The song now takes a pleading, screaming tone:

I said please, please understand
I’m in love with another man

This is another two lines that can be shouted rather than sung in the shower. Key change again. It’s quite self explanatory, she pleads with the boy to understand that she has another long term partner. Presumably they are married but this doesn’t really matter. The point is that before the one night stand, she and this other fella were in love, and they still are…

And what he couldn’t give me (oh oh oh oh)
was the one little thing that you can

SPERM! The whole song is about sperm. Now we don’t know the particular reproductive issues that the other man is having, it could be low testosterone leading to low sperm count, low motility, auto immune disorder whereby his sperm is attacked by his own immune system, chainsaw accident etc – either way, the woman wanted to have a baby, the man she was in love with was not able to provide one, so she sought out a stranger to have sex with and become pregnant.

What isn’t made clear is whether the woman told her long term partner what she was planning, or whether the man knows that he’s impotent, or whether the man knows that the child that he is presumably raising as his own really is his own!

Personally I’d love to know what the other side of this relationship looks like, but according to the way the woman callously refused to consider the feelings of the “lonely boy” earlier in the song, I think it’s highly likely that the “other man” has no idea that she had sex with strangers in order to get pregnant, and if that’s the case, he doesn’t know that the child isn’t his.

If i’m right about the distinctive trait that was passed down through the generations allowing the stranger to recognise his own child (the song says that it’s the eyes – let’s say he has red eyes, like a white rabbit or satan) – then it’s quite incredible that the “other man” doesn’t have his suspicions. It’s perfectly possible that he does and that this isn’t addressed in the song, but I would like to believe that through the power of denial he is willing to accept that this child is his own flesh and blood.

If he truly loves the woman, he will stay with her and care for the offspring anyway. If she truly loves “the other man” she would have explained everything to him even before she started picking up random strangers and taking them to the hotel.

Fade out to a couple of rounds of the chorus

That’s the end of the song! What wild tale. So complicated, so many feelings… It reveals something unpleasant about human nature, but at the same time I think it’s absolutely the best song ever written.

Here are the full lyrics, maybe there’s something I missed:

It was a rainy night when
He came into sight
Standing by the road, no umbrella,
No coat
So I pulled up along side and
I offered him a ride
He accepted with a smile
So we drove for a while
I didn’t ask him his name,
This lonely boy in the rain
Fate tell me it’s right,
Is this love at first sight
Please don’t make it wrong
Just stay for the night

All I wanna do is make love to you
Say you will
You want me too
All I wanna do is make love to you
I’ve got lovin’ arms to hold on to

So we found this hotel,
It was a place I knew well
We made magic that night.
Oh, he did everything right
He brought the woman out of me,
So many times, easily
And in the morning when he woke
All I left him was a note
I told him
“I am the flower you are the seed”
We walked in the garden
We planted a tree
Don’t try to find me,
Please don’t you dare
Just live in my memory,
You’ll always be there

All I wanna do is make love to you
One night of love was all we knew
All I wanna do is make love to you
I’ve got lovin’ arms to hold on to

Oh, oooh, we made love
Love like strangers
All night long
We made love

Then it happened one day,
We came round the same way
You can imagine his surprise
When he saw his own eyes
I said “please, please understand
I’m in love with another man
And what he couldn’t give me, how-oh
Was the one little thing that you can”

All I wanna do is make love to you
One night of love was all we knew
All I wanna do is make love to you
Say you will, you want me too

All night long
All night long
All night long
All night long

Songwriters: Robert John Lange

All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

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Before you get excited I write this as a devout atheist. For almost as long as I can remember I have been certain that there is no god however, I was thinking about something tonight that made me reconsider.

This was written during a time of crisis, the COVID19 Pandemic of 2020. There is a lot of uncertainty in the world, and your author has been thinking a lot about all of the people affected in one way or another.

I wanted to let out a primal scream, to tell a higher power how I’m feeling and ask them to look out for us. I instantly rejected this notion out of hand on account me believing that there is no god.

As a thought experiment I wondered who I could complain to instead. Humanity has a strange habit of making up gods when it finds the ones it has lacking. I started to think about Simulation Hypothesis.

If the various philosophers and scientists that have weighed in on the matter are correct, it is very likely that we exist in a simulation. If we do exist in a simulation, it also stands to reason that an entity of some kind has decided to run the simulation. If they have decided to run the simulation that we are in, they expect to get some information from it.

If the creator of the simulation expects to get information out from the simulation, and you offer up a prayer, then how are you treating the creator of the simulation differently from a god?

Think about the powers we attribute to gods. Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence – let’s break these down and see how they match up with an entity in charge of our own simulation:

Omniscience – There is little point running a simulation if you can’t examine it and extract all the information. We would expect our simulation creator to know everything (or at least be able to look up everything) within the simulation. Outside the simulation isn’t relevant to us as we can’t escape the simulation.

Omnipotence – Our simulation creator is all powerful, having access to a literal “god mode” on our simulation. We assume that our creator would be able to change things about the simulation at will, make code changes wherever they feel like it, perhaps speed up the speed of light or destroy one of your relatives because they are bored. Think of how people play The Sims – Perhaps the God in the story of Job was happily playing the Sims when his mate Satan came over and persuaded God to make Job swim in the pool and delete the ladder. Maybe God and Satan were fucking with Job because his life is as inconsequential as a computer game. Maybe all of our lives are that inconsequential.

Omnipresence – The creator of our simulation isn’t confined by it’s natural laws. They can peer in wherever they like, they can deconstruct your brain virtually to see why you made a decision, they can provide the illusion of randomness. There is nowhere inside the simulation that the creator cannot go.

So anyway – I was wondering, if I believe that we exist inside a simulation, and I believe that this possibility is far more likely than the existence of any of your classic gods, then it must stand to reason that the simulation has a creator, and that creator has all of the attributes of a god, and therefore, there might be a god.

So with this knowledge, I offer my new god information in the form of prayer. Perhaps I will write it down in this blog, or maybe on a scrap of paper, or say it out loud, or think it inside. I don’t think it matters how you do it because of the powers already mentioned, if the creator was sufficiently interested they could certainly get the information from wherever you put it.

Now the next thing to consider is whether the creator would be willing to help you with anything. If the purpose of the simulation is to test historical models or ancestor simulations etc it might be very important that the creator doesn’t intervene so as not to ruin the experiment. However if the purpose of the simulation is more like entertainment (think of your Greek Pantheon perhaps) then we might be in business.

The concept of “pleasing” gods or entertaining gods in various ways might provide what we all need right now – the cheat codes to life – or perhaps answered prayers….

I still consider myself an atheist, but I might follow Pascal’s example and hedge my bets.

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It’s easy to forget how much the web has changed over the last few years.

Let’s go back to 2000. From the user interface perspective, not much had changed between 1994 and 2000, but the graphics looked a bit better, faster connections meant bigger images with more colours, better images could be transferred with less bandwidth due to better compression techniques.

What made the internet of 20 years ago different to the internet of today?Well the connections have definitely improved. I had a 9kbps connection through my phone to my laptop in 2002, today I have access to multiple networks and I don’t even know how much bandwidth they have because that’s something you only check when it’s not enough…

Moore’s Law has also been hard at work. Computer servers became more powerful and less expensive, so there are more of them doing work faster which means that pages get served faster. Then there are the devices we use like our phones and laptops. These are also many times more powerful than their predecessors. This means that browser side computations can be done, speeding the whole process up even more.

If you told me in 1994 all of the things that I could be doing using the Internet of 2020 I would be astonished.

Why Am I So Excited About GANNS

Ganns or Generative Adversarial Neural Networks, or technology much like them, is what will make machines creative.

It’s exciting to me because in the future it will be possible to see or experience literally anything you can imagine. To begin with this will be on the computer screen, later it will be in 3D virtual reality or augmented reality displays, and eventually it will be directly in your brain via human machine interfaces.

This sounds far fetched but computers are already creating things. Have a look at thispersondoesnotexist.com – Every image on that website was created from scratch* by a computer. There are plenty of other examples too, just have a quick search and see what you can find.

It’s not just creating images either, a study came out recently where they showed that a GANN could create several frames of video from a static photograph input. This means we could make video from photos.

So why are GANNS called GANNS? – There are two neural networks in a gan, one is the generator, the other is the discriminator. The generator’s job is to produce material that closely resembles “real” material, whether that’s photos, text, video etc. The discriminator must decide if the output looks real. Generative makes sense because they generate things, Adversarial refers to the process of analysing the generated material and deciding whether or not it’s real. Neural Networks are multilayered networks that can process data in particular ways. The exciting thing about Neural Networks is that they can learn.

So what we have is a neural network who’s job it is to “create” material from previously learned examples and a neural network who’s job it is to decide whether the output is “real” or not. What we end up with is a photorealistic output that was created by the machine. *It’s important to note that what the machine “creates” is an output from things it’s already seen, so the images are not 100% from scratch. To be fair though, a human artist painting a portrait does the same thing and we don’t penalise them for it.

You can run a GANN on your own computer right now, although to get large images you need a ridiculous amount of memory on your graphics card. Text generators such as the infamous GPT2 network can be run with relatively few computing resources. Video is currently beyond the personal computer and can only be done on specialist high performance computers (super computers). This is where a current technology can be extrapolated out using Moore’s law and we can start to make some predictions about where the technology is going.

What Is The Future of GANNs?

What we will be able to do with this technology (or one like it) in the future is mind blowing. Let’s try to think about some of the things it will be possible to do.

Example 1 – Create a Movie From a Book

“Computer, make a movie out of the Harry Potter books”

“There’s already movie series based on those books, would you like to watch it?”

“No, make a new one. Make me be Harry”

“Do you have any preference for any of the other characters?”

“Hagrid should be Brian Blessed, you choose the rest”

Example 2 – Virtual Reality Roleplay

“Computer, generate a companion for me”

“What gender?”

“Female”

“Name?”

“Hmmm, I don’t know, can you choose one later?”

“What does she look like?”

“5’8″, dark skin, long brown hair, brown eyes, bi-racial with Asian and African heritage, slim”

“What is she wearing”

“You decide”

“Your character is ready – Her name is Laila”

“Cool – let’s play Dungeons and Dragons – You be the dungeon master, I want some fast paced adventure, no romance or anything like that and fewer mysteries than last time”

Example 3 – Virtual Photo Studio

“Computer I need a photoshoot for our range of bedding products for our new website”

“Ok – we can start with the 600 thread count luxury range”

“Right – Show me those sheets in a fancy bedroom on a nice bed”

Computer generates an image

“No, I think the bed should be a Super King Size”

The bed changes from a double to a super kingsize

“The room is a bit dark, can you make the walls lighter and put in a window?”

The image changes according to the request.

“Ok, that’s cool, can you have the camera come from a higher angle?”

The angle changes

“Nice! Ok, now show me three other angles from this room”

The images appear.

“On this middle image, can you shift the camera left by 20 degrees and add some more light? Also make the sheet a bit ruffled like someone just got out”

The image changes again

“Awesome – Please render those out and create similar images for the other 8 colours in the luxury range, I’ll approve them later. Now let’s do the Basic range”

Example 4 – Create Music!

“Computer – please design a new soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz based on music by Pink Floyd – I’m going out to buy some weed”

“Computer – Make a mashup of All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You by Heart and Juicy by The Notorious B.I.G”

“Computer, play Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne in the style of Death Metal”

“Computer – here’s a video of me doing laundry – please design a sweeping motion picture score for it in the style of John Williams”

Example 5- Edit Video

“Computer, make a new cut of The Lord of the Rings with all the boring bits cut out. It should be about an hour”

Example 6 – Create Images

“Computer – What would I look like if I lost 20kg?”

“Computer – Make a photo of me aged 70”

Example 7 – Use Video and Photos to Bring Someone Back to Life in Augmented Reality

“Computer, you see this dog? Her name is Ruby. Go through all my photos and videos to make a virtual companion of her”

It’s not going to take long to reach this point. In 2000 it was normal to have 16mb or maybe 32mb of graphics memory. The most expensive cards had 128mb. The most advanced networks today currently require 15GB or more of graphics memory which is only available on the highest end cards, and even then it can take days to generate a single image.

As with all technologies, we expect that time will bring with it more affordable computing power. The difference between 128mb for the very best cards in 2000 and 15GB for todays top end cards is 468 times. We could be looking at cards with 7TB of graphics memory 20 years from today.

I suspect though that our devices will not get a whole lot more powerful, we will simply get the resources we need from the cloud. This will reply upon much better bandwidth, but I’m sure that’s coming.

A graphics card with many hundreds of thousands of compute cores and 7TB of memory might easily be able to generate realtime video in 360 degrees 20 years from now.

Several years ago I watched an NVIDIA keynote where they released the latest TITAN graphics card. It had a huge number of teraflops of power, so much so that Jenson Hwang called it “A supercomputer in a graphics card”.

I was a little sceptical at that claim so looked up the top supercomputers in the 500 list (a global list of the 500 most powerful computers). A computer with the same number of teraflops was on that list only 5 years previously. That’s an example of how fast computing resources change at the bleeding edge of performance.

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What if Pascal’s Wager, Roko’s Basilisk and Simulation Hypothesis had a baby?

Warning – This article may be considered an information hazard

Primer:

Roko’s Basilisk is a thought experiment the consequences of which have allegedly driven people mad or to kill themselves. I have never taken it particularly seriously, but here are the basics:

What if at some point in the future there is an artificial superinteligence. Once it gains power is begins to audit humanity’s efforts to bring it about in the first place. Those that are found to have not done everything in their power to bring the artificial super intelligence into being are then tortured for eternity using means only available to an artificial superintelligence that are so awful that our puny human intellect can not even begin to imagine how awful they are.

That’s Roko’s Basilisk in a nutshell

Pascal’s Wager – If you are an atheist, and there is no god, then what is point in believing in one? Well, if it turns out you are wrong and the consequence for not believing is eternal damnation in the fires of hell, and the upside is so good, living in Heaven at the right hand of Jesus for all eternity, then why wouldn’t one choose to believe, just in case?

Simulation Hypothesis – Many scientists agree that in some point in the future we will be able to simulate a human mind, and complex physical interactions to the extent that we could simulate every human brain and the entire universe at the same time.

Due to the exponential rate at which computing power improves, there should be a point at which every human on earth (or beyond) can run their own simulation, or indeed multiple simulations to determine different outcomes.

There are so many uses for these simulations that it seems that as soon as we are capable of running them, we will run as many as we can.

Let’s have a quick think about why we might run them.

Let’s look at Ancestor Simulations – Why wouldn’t we want to learn the secrets of ancient Egypt or what really happened the day Julius Caesar was murdered?

Given the correct inputs at a particular point in time, the simulation might be run backwards to arrive at those secrets, if it’s detailed enough. If the results of the simulation don’t quite add up to the known facts we might add multiple variations on the inputs. There are so many possible variables that we might run hundreds of thousands of simulations with differing variables to discover exactly what Caesar said to Brutus. “Brutus you treacherous snake!” perhaps he said. Or maybe “Mange Tu Brutus?”. The point is that we could tweak as many variables as we need to get the result we desire.

Perhaps we will run these simulations as a form of entertainment, much like watching a TV show. Assuming that brain machine interfaces become advanced enough we may even decide to insert ourselves in to our simulations. Asking yourself the question “What if I was the grand high supreme ruler of the universe for a thousand years?” would no longer be an unknowable question, but simply a matter of plugging in the correct variable to the simulation and jacking in.

Archaeologists would certainly love to have access to ancestry simulations, but what about other people?

Let’s think, when humans have a lifespan of thousands of years, would you fire up a simulation to try to discover the location of that pair of earrings you lost in 1999? Perhaps you are a teenager given the homework assignment” Why Didn’t Humanity Act to Curb Climate Change in 2018 When They Knew It Was Dangerous”, and a class of 15 year olds hurriedly plug in the variables to create several different simulations on their phones (or whatever technology we have when simulations will be available to the mainstream).

Given the likely ubiquity of simulations in the future, it seems inconceivable that we, humans, are not currently living inside a simulation.

To make matters worse, there is actually evidence that we may be living in a simulation, things like seemingly artificial limits that constrain the amount of data required to run a simulation, or the double slit experiment and quantum theory, which might be a very clever way to reduce the amount of data required for a simulation.

So how do Roko’s Basilisk and Pascal’s Wager tie in to this?

Well I’m an atheist, and I don’t believe in anything super natural. However, last night I was struck by a terrible thought….

So I imagine that when we die we simply see oblivion. There is nothing, just the black shapeless void of which we have no conscious understanding, so for us, the world simply stops. My current framework for understanding the world explained this to me perfectly clearly.

If consciousness is a physical property of the way our brains are wired up and nothing more, then when we die, these connections start to break down and your conscious mind is no longer any good, and has no experience of itself.

That, to me, is easily understood, and I’ve absolutely no suspicion that a god or jesus or devil type person will take over at this point. The whole theory of religion seems utterly pointless.

But!!

If we introduce simulation hypothesis things start to go off the rails. Because it really depends on who is running the simulation and for what purpose. Most of us, when we are children, go through a phase of wondering whether anybody else in the world has conscious experience and whether the whole thing isn’t there just for our own amusement. Well what if that was true?

What if some entity in the future decided to run a simulation for each and every person to see whether they made the same moral choices every time, or what the limits of their morality were, or where they would break down and start to do dishonest or immoral things?

And what if the price of failure was a new simulation of eternal damnation, and the price of success is to end the simulation permanently, or be moved to a new simulation where the rules are better, or perhaps be moved to another morality test where only the most moral are promoted?

Even more distressing, the clock speed of the simulation for “bad people” could be sped up, meaning that you might have to endure 100,000 years for every second that passes, or perhaps even more. Now imagine that you are subject to some sort of medieval torture like being stretched on the rack with all your sinews cracking, your joints being pulled apart one by one, but this lasts for 100,000 years for every second that passes in realtime.

How long until the end of the universe? Because that’s how long the Basilisk will make you suffer. You can’t even go unconscious, because in the virtual environment all of your sensations and bodily responses are controlled by the computer. Perhaps the Basilisk could even dial up your sensations of pain so that every braincell is straining with the effort of experience.

This is encoded in Hinduism and Buddhism where one is forced to remain on earth, rebirthed forever until one’s karma balances out. That’s just a mystic interpretation of what I’ve said above, or what I’ve said above in technical terms has been understood by eastern religions for thousands of years.

It all depends on the motivation of the entity running the simulation, and from inside the simulation there is no way to tell.

This leads me back to Pascal’s Wager – If there is no god, then what’s the harm? If there is a god, then you have complied and served god, so good for you. So Pascal’s Simulated Basilisk posits the following:

If we are living in a simulation, the chance of eternal damnation or eternal pleasure is much higher than if we aren’t. If we can accept those facts, we should try to “win” the simulation.

So the next obvious question is: What does the entity running the simulation want?

Well I don’t know the answer to that question. But if we examine the world’s existing belief systems we see that there are some things in common. Now whether those commonalities were planted by the simulator or whether the simulation simply created them through evolution because they were sensible, I don’t know, but they seem pretty solid. I think the basics are the following:

1) Don’t kill people

2) Treat others how you like to be treated

That seems enough to be getting on with, but what about other questions of morals? Is it immoral to use electricity because coal and gas power stations pollute the atmosphere which other people share?

There are so many levels of morality it’s hard to know where to start. When I eat meat I know that an animal had to suffer. Does that count? Should I be a vegan? Yet I also understand that humans are literally designed (figuratively designed, probably better to say Adapted) to eat meat. Here in the UK our ethics around the way we treat animals are very good, but does that assuage all sin? Would I personally be happy with a high level of welfare if the entire point of my life was to be slaughtered and turned into a hamburger?

What about polyester being an oil product that has negative externalities all over the world? Or the fact that living in the UK at a high standard of living means that necessarily I must enjoy the profits of imperialism and the slave trade.

How do I feel about children mining Cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo for my iPhone? How do I feel that entire villages in China were submerged by water from damming operations to build the huge industrial centres that build the parts for this very computer I’m writing on?

Perhaps I should kill myself, as that is the only way to ensure that the negative externalities of my existence do not proliferate, but then, how do I stop the funeral home from using formaldehyde and burying it in the ground? And what about the emotional negative externalities I’ll be pushing on my family and friends?

After considering the various impacts I think I must keep things within reason. Give homeless people change, donate to charities, offer to help old ladies cross the street etc.

But where does it end? I fear the Basilisk judging me far than than I fear god, because the basilisk may well be real, and has access to torments that god is far too dull to dream up.

At this point our brains seem to be relatively safe inside the simulation, in that we know that when we die the brain decomposes and can no longer be used, but the virtual encoding of the brain could be copied infinitely, with each copy living out it’s own heaven or hell or something in the middle.

What I’d be really concerned about is cryopreservation – What if in the future, the basilisk exists and is able to reconstitute your consciousness from your frozen corpse and put it through torments so awful that we can’t even begin to imagine how awful they are.

For this reason alone, not being able to tell the future, I prefer the comforting blanket of unconscious oblivion, I welcome the void – DO NOT PRESERVE ME – I’d rather have oblivion than something worse than hell for all of eternity.

So it’s over to you – What do you make of Pascal’s Simulated Basilisk?

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