The Computational Problem of Evil

Speaker 1

Next, we’ll hear from Giulio Prisco. He’s a writer, a technology expert, futurist and transhumanist. Former manager in European Science and Technology Centers, he writes and speaks on a wide range of topics, including science, information technology, emerging technologies, virtual worlds, space exploration and future studies. He’s especially interested in the convergence of science, technology and spirituality, speaking on the computational problem of evil.

Giulio Prisco

I think it was a bit of a problem. Okay.

Giulio Prisco

First, thank you very much for having me. And the argument that I want to make, I am afraid it cannot really be made in ten minutes without manager cuts. That’s why I’m going to have to assume that you guys are already familiar with most of well, actually with all of the concepts that I will have to introduce. I know that most of you are familiar with these things indeed. For those who are not, well, my eye is here. I am on the MTA mailing lists, and I am always happy to talk.

Giulio Prisco

Okay, that is really an age old question. If a God is good and God is omnipotent, why does evil exist? I’m not going to be able to answer that, and the philosophers have been discussing this for centuries. and we’ll go on for other scientists. I’m going to do my best to try to give some hints of what the answer could be, if the concept of answer makes any sense. course.

Giulio Prisco

This is a discussion that comes frequently when you talk with um a friend who had something unpleasant happen to them in life. And we all have had unpleasant things happen to us in life. So we ask ourselves the question: why doesn’t God help me? If God knew that this bad thing was going to happen to me or was going to happen to this person I love, why didn’t God do something to prevent that? The problem of evil is an important question, and I think a negative answer to this question is one of the main reasons why many people refuse to embrace religion.

Giulio Prisco

How can we answer that? Well, the middle-aged philosophers who are gave a lot of thought to these things, had already formulated some kind of answers based on the concept that complete omnipotency is not uh as logically consistent as it seems. And they used to make the example of the stone. So God is omnipotent. That means that God can make a stone so heavy that not even a God can lift it. But hold on a moment. If God cannot lift this stone, then God was not omnipotent to begin with. There is no answer to this question, which means that The concept of omnipotency has to be defined and limited in some way.

Giulio Prisco

A more modern but similar formulation of the concept is trying to answer the question Can God draw a triangle with uh four sides? If God is omnipotent, then God should be able to. But uh a triangle with four sides cannot exist because uh something with four sides is not a Triangle. Not even God can draw a triangle with four sides. I think everyone will agree on that. Does anyone think that God could draw a triangle with four sides? Nobody seems to think so. Okay. That’s the answer I wanted to hear anyway.

Giulio Prisco

I’m going to assume not even assume I’m going to consider the possibility that our reality is in some sense uh a computation happening in uh a higher level of reality. We are all familiar with video games and we have uh monsters and people and things in video games. These are not really thinking. These are simple computer programs. But I think sooner or later, and that’s the way technology seems to be headed, we will be able to create simulated universes that contain thinking beings like ourselves. So we had to ask ourselves the question well, maybe we are living ourselves in a reality, which is a computation, a simulation from the point of view of some system operator living in a higher level of reality. The answer to this question depends very much on aesthetic personal references. But let’s consider this possibility for a moment.

Giulio Prisco

who is the system operator? I want to make the minimum possible number of assumptions about the system operator. I’m just going to call the system operator a god. without making other assumptions. How to frame the problem of evil in this scenario?

Giulio Prisco

Let’s consider a much simpler simulation to start with. I believe most of you are familiar with the game of life, who is a cellular automata computation invented by John Conway some forty years ago and is used very frequently as an example when discussing physics of computation and the concept of simulated realities. There are many interesting things in the life universe. For example, this is a very interesting one. It’s called the unit cell. The unit cell is an arrangement of cells. that reproducing the evolution of the cellular automata life itself. which means that if you fill the plane with uh many patterns like this, they are going to evolve like life itself. And the sale is going to be on or off depending on the presence or absence of the glider in this place. So this is a way to simulate the evolution of life within life itself.

Giulio Prisco

I can build a life computer within life. Of course, the price that I had to pay is that this simulation is going to be much, much slower than life itself, several thousands of times. So I can simulate a simulation within the simulation itself, but it’s not going to be as fast as real time.

Giulio Prisco

And this has some bearing on the possibility to predict what the future will be. In fact, life is an example of irreducible computation. in the science that there are no computational shortcuts. If you want to know what the future will be, you have to perform the computation until the future happens. There is no way from going to one time to another time without having to go through all the times in between. And this is what happens in our universe as well. There is no way to build a machine to predict the future. complete accuracy faster than real time itself, faster than waiting for the future to happen. Or in other words It’s impossible to build a program to compute tomorrow’s weather in less than twenty four hours. Maybe that’s why it was raining this morning.

Giulio Prisco

What does that mean? Well, uh I’m not going to demonstrate this. It’s quite easy. It is almost self-aggregated to me. So not even God can compute what will happen in the future, given what is happening now. and the laws of physics with one hundred percent absolute certainty, because data is a logical impossibility. The only way for God to know what will happen in the future is to wait for the future to happen. There is no other thing that God can do.

Giulio Prisco

There is perhaps one thing that God could do. wants to know what will happen in our universe faster than letting it happen in order to prevent evil in our u in our universe, perhaps God could use just use a faster computer. So this uh is an old computer. This is a new computer, a very last generation gaming computer, very fast with uh lot of computational power. It’s going to take much less time to execute the same computation than this computer.

Giulio Prisco

But well, it turns out that God cannot really do that, because we are talking of very complex computation that contain thinking being like ourselves. So if God wants to simulate our universe here, he cannot do that without generating the same subjective experiences than the thinking being in our universe experience. So no so if God wants that uh nobody suffers here and runs the computation on a faster computer, then somebody would suffer in the f computation running on faster computers. So God has not solved the problem of evil after all. It seems that this is really a fundamental limitation of what any conceivable gold can or cannot do.

Giulio Prisco

Okay, let’s take a look at some other examples of things happening in the life universe. This is a universal Turing machine. Yes, there is a universal Turing machine in life. This would happen if you leave the computation of this universal Turing machine running for fifty thousand iterations. This is a very interesting system. You basically have The input, which is a description of another Turing machine, is a stream of gliders moving in this direction. So you have this input here. The machine does certain computation, and then it Performs its job that being a universal Turing machine is the emulation of another Turing machine, whatever the other Turing machine is.

Giulio Prisco

And once we know that in the universe of life there is a universal Turing machine, we are kind of forced to ask ourselves the question, can a thinking and feeling pattern exist in this simple cellular automata universe. It seems a very strange notion But if you think of it, it’s very difficult to deny the possibility that thinking and feeling being can exist in the universe of life. And in fact, John Conway himself was persuaded. that given a very large pattern, but I mean really very, very, very large, something like consciousness could arise. Now I used to think myself that the answer to this question is yes. I’m starting to have second thoughts, and that maybe is the talk that I would submit for the conference next year. I still need to think a little bit about that. But okay, let’s just consider the possibility that some arrangement of cells in the life universe can think and feel and perhaps experience evil and suffering like ourselves.

Giulio Prisco

Let’s uh okay, just make that push. No, that’s not the thing I want. Okay.

Giulio Prisco

This is an example of this Turing machine running. Focus your attention on the little things here. that, as most of you will know, are called gliders. These are very simple configurations of cells in life. And of course, they are far too simple to have subjective states and subjective experiences. But let’s suspend this belief for a moment and let’s think of these little things here as having something that we could call mental states. Specifically, I’m going to give a glider a name. I’m going to call him Joe to personalize him a little bit, to let us empathize with uh what happens to this uh very little thing in our simulated universe. It is a very simple thing. It can be it can be going in four possible directions. It can have one of four phases along this So it can be in one of sixteen possible configurations. Let’s call this configuration mental states. Let’s think that a glider has mental states. So maybe when the glider is going northwest is happy, when it’s going the northeast, is unhappy or something like that. The phase changes are the a representation of the things that happen in our own head when we go about our lives. Let’s think that that’s what will happen because it will help following my argument.

Giulio Prisco

And let’s see what happened in the life of GeoGlider. You see there are things that move. You can see that each glider retain in some sense its individuality. As we go along. And maybe that can be collisions, for example, here, that change the trajectory of a glider. Like in our lives, things can happen that have an important impact on our mental state and make us change our mind. And now something bad, something very bad will happen to this guy. Because it’s going to have a collision with uh this other glider and it’s going to be destroyed. See, now it has been destroyed, and what is even worse is that also all these gliders here will be destroyed. This is really a genocide of Glaius, and I am playing the role of God here. And I want to do something to save the life of Joe Glaius.

Giulio Prisco

Let’s try to do something. I want to flip two bits and make this guy go in another direction. Let’s see what happened here. Okay, now it’s not dead. Because I just flipped a couple of bits. I have done a little very subtle intervention in the laws of physics. A little violation of the laws of physics, but maybe it’s so small that nobody notices. And the glider still feels like a glider. He’s going in a different direction, but maybe he still feels like Joe. Well, he’s going to collide with something and he’s going to die anyway. So my God, so I wanted to save his life, but he’s still going to die.

Giulio Prisco

Let’s try to do something. It’s okay. Let’s try to steer it continuously. Like I can drive my car in Salt Lake City. I was driving a brand car last night. We’re going right, left. Let me do the same thing with the glider. Okay, I did something that I should not really have done. Now I’m going to save it because you know, if I steer it continuously all the time, I can save this glider for any conceivable situation, but But Joe is not a glider anymore. The glide the gliderness is gone. So whatever I had was called the Joe glider. Now I can only call it is a non glider, so I have can only call him non Joe. Because it’s not uh Joe anymore. Joe is dead. I I’ve not been able to save Joe’s life.

Giulio Prisco

Uh so too many frequent invasive sin invasive interventions. I had a nice bottle font here, but it has gone. Too many frequent and basic interventions on an essential entity destroys the personal essence and self. Thou shalt not a puppet thinking beings. This is another bit of a possible solution to the problem of evil.

Giulio Prisco

Now last but not least Whatever happens to you, whatever happens to any glider in this simulation, is a part of a computation which is meant to do something. This computation is trying to go from here to here to generate some kind of answer to some kind of question. I don’t know, perhaps so that has a purpose. And Even a very small intervention with the best intention, like saving a life, could have conceivably very unpleasant consequences because it would invalidate the inner logic of the computation itself. So even things that we don’t like to see happening, but yet happen all the time in the natural world that has been produced by evolution And there is not a nice thing to say, but perhaps even evil and suffering have a purpose that we are not able to see. from our perspective, but perhaps make sense from another perspective.

Giulio Prisco

And I think that’s it. Thank you very much.