סמינר מחקר 5 ביוני: מאיר חמו - ״השערת הסימולציה״ - אפילו לא שקרית

״השערת הסימולציה״ – אפילו לא שקרית

אוניברסיטת חיפה

(The lecture will be delivered in Hebrew)

According to the Simulation Hypothesis (SH) it is possible (and even likely) that we live in a computer simulation. But what does the SH say precisely? We examine various intuitive scenarios, such as the brain-in-a-vat scenario, virtual reality, the King’s dream by Lewis Carroll, and we argue that these scenarios don’t capture the SH since they don’t capture the idea that our minds are simulated. We then argue that the SH is nothing but a straightforward implication of the computational theory of mind, and we give two independent arguments, which severely undermine it. The first argument, from the multiple realizability of the mental by the physical, shows that the computational theory of mind and the SH imply mind-body dualism. The second argument, from what we call the multiple-computations theorem, shows that the computational theory and the SH are ill-defined. Our conclusion is that in a purely physical world the SH is not even false in the sense that it is either ill-defined or physically impossible.

התכנסות לקפה וכיבוד קל בשעה 17:45 ליד חדר 496

יו"ר: שאול קציר

הציבור מוזמן