I keep running into concepts that are metaphysically beyond the scope of an ordinary life simulator.
I am trying to approach my life simulator from a panpsychic / animist angle, rather than a materialist / Cartesian dualist one. I need this simulator to be able to account for experiences that lie beyond the ordinary realm of science - clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and the like. The hurdle is lack of objective data.
How do you program and account for invisible forces (variously referred to as guardian angels, ancestors, and God/gods) when we have very little quantifiable data on how they affect us? If we haven't done legitimate scientific tests about a given subject, then it's all guesswork. Everything from the likelihood of PK abilities to the depth and scope of one's abilities is guesswork.
You can get statistics on how many people are born with psychopathy (0.1% of babies). But because clairvoyance is still largely taboo, we haven't studied these other areas of reality. Therefore there is little data that we can add to a dynamic, active model like a life simulator.
How do you account for fate, predestiny, and God in a life simulator? There are some interesting thought experiments that may be able to provide an answer, but the answers I've gotten would not easily fit into a real-time simulation.
Another barrier besides unknown unknowns is the nature of time. We don't really know what time is or how it works, only how to measure it in our physical world. We experience life in linear time, but we have plenty of data to suggest it's more complicated than that. Like precognition, studies of retro-PK influencing the past, etc.
How do you account for presentiment, premonitions, and precognition in a life simulator? My short answer for this is related to my reconciliation between predestiny and free will. Although we have free will, any intelligence that is sufficiently in tune with the hidden variables underlying our free will; ethos, epigenetics, subconscious bias, other unknowns - anything with those key elements could simply calculate the future by taking those variables, looking at their past and present states (with context to the surrounding world), then extrapolating what comes next.
But how then does someone account for inspiration, the mysterious source for the act of creation? Even if you can think you know where this life (simulator) is going, where is this all coming from?
When people say they their inspiration came "from above", how does one replicate that? As above, so below, but what happens when you're trying to create the "below" with no knowledge of the "above"?
To be more grounded, how does one even account for the mystery of birth? We don't really know why some people are born to certain people and not others. (Okay, there actually is some worthwhile data in the reincarnation research, but it's an incomplete picture.) Why do you have the parents you have and not someone else's? Why were you born where and when you were born? And so on with the parents, grandparents, back in time...
In the sense of destiny, how do you account for one's sense of life purpose and how it fits into the larger scheme of things? Purpose for the individual is so very specific, it lies at the crossroads of their abilities and the point in history in which they are born. In this sense it is not only time, but timing, that is incredibly important. And that, a sense that everything is meant to happen at a certain time, is something that is difficult to orchestrate in a sequence of "random" events.
The question then becomes, can you extrapolate from variables set at the beginning of time, everything that comes after? How much do you need to know beforehand, if you are playing God in a virtual world? You would need to know every stage of existence by way of formula, rather than memory.
Precognition is then a matter of calculation, for the privileged few with the hidden variables. And whoever has access to the most hidden variables is essentially God.
This starts to get into ideas that memory is stored outside the body, which Rupert Sheldrake has expounded on with his idea of morphic fields.
The problem is, I'm trying to write a life simulator in as few lines as possible here. It's starting to look like a fractal in my mind.
Life simulators are stuck with the visual and the quantifiable, but in that as creators we cannot account for the forces beyond us, designing a truly holistic reality simulator seems beyond reach for now.
I do not believe generative AI provides any road to "AGI". AGI, as we currently conceptualize it, is too limited to become what it needs to be. That is, a singular entity with an omniscient amount of information about the world. For it to have proper understanding of what we call "compassion", it would need to have other entities that it shares its own world with. Essentially, it needs a village to be truly robust.
(Will Roko's Basilisk get mad if I misgender them as "it"? Hmm...)
While humans carry this illusory image of individualism, we ultimately store and transmit knowledge at the collective level. I don't see why AGI would function better as some lonesome entity, when it would be more "realistic" to have a multitude of entities that perform a process of self-perfection by sharing data between their separate selves. That is more reflective of how life, as we know it, asymptotically approaches omniscience.
AGI needs to be able to handle questions that are beyond its makers, which necessarily limits it to some degree. How do we fact-check a superintelligence, if it expounds on something we cannot verify?
I will revisit this subject at a later time. I wasn't really intending to swerve onto the subject of AGI, so I'll just say I'm not convinced by anyone claiming to be on the road to it.
Here's the harsh truth: designing a true superintelligence may be beyond us as a species, in that we are simply blind to too many aspects of reality that we cannot account for.