I am not an animal, and this is not a Skinner Box.
The Air Crib was designed to keep baby clean and comfortable, in ideal conditions, while reducing mom's workload. It didn't quite catch on. Some of that may well be because the Air Crib came from the fertile mind of Burrhus Frederic Skinner, better known by his initials as B. F. Skinner. If your name was Burrhus Fredrick, you'd probably stick with initials too.
As a psychologist in the 1940s and '50s, Skinner was already famous for the invention of another sort of box—the Skinner Box, or "operant conditioning chamber." This was a device used in studying animal behavior. A typical Skinner Box provided food and water for the animal inside (usually rats or pigeons) and limited the noise and light coming in to keep the inhabitants of the box from being distracted by things happening outside. The box also had some means of providing signals, like a series of lights or buzzers. And also a means of getting some feedback, such as one or more button or levers the animal could press.
The idea was that you put the animal inside, isolate it from unwanted external influence, provide some kind of defined stimulus, and watched the response. Food pellet for pressing the red lever. Hurrah! Annoying buzzer for pressing green. Boo! And oops, maybe an electrified floor to really move things along. With that sort of image in mind, it may have bothered people to see Skinner putting his own daughter in a box—no matter how pure his intentions. An article about Skinner's Air Crib titled "Baby in a Box" helped cement the connection. For many people, Skinner became that guy who wanted to put kids in a box and raise them in isolation. (When he was actually that guy who used operant conditioning to teach a pair of pigeons to play ping-pong. Yes, really.)
To see what any of this has to do with the nature of the universe, just carefully open the orange gate and come on it. There are pigeon pictures. You wouldn't want to miss that.
In case you thought I was kidding
Skinner's main contribution to psychology centered around the idea of "radical behaviorism." In short, Skinner thought psychology had put way too much emphasis on the idea of "mind" as a kind of disembodied thinking engine, and not nearly enough emphasis on how behavior was shaped by more immediate and observable concepts such as "wow, that tasted nice" and "please, oh, please, don't hurt me again." He created his famous box while he was a grad student. Which figures.
And that's why I think if we are in a simulated universe, then it's not a sim being generated by more advanced humans.
Huh? Oh. This would probably be a good spot for that "author's note" thing. Hang on.
If found, return to Carl Sagan, Cornell University, New York, USA, Earth.
Author's Note—This is a piece about the universe, aliens, computers, bastards and why there may not be, but probably are,
alien computer bastards. It's long, long enough that this Part 3. Part 3? Are you #@$!&ing kidding me?
Part 3? Couldn't you have said that before I came inside. I could have... but hey, I didn't So if you missed
Part 1 or
Part 2, you might want to go back and read them now, because a lot of what's in there is going to play into what's coming up. Or you can just sort of zen the whole thing. Let's see how that works for you.
Back in Part 1, we sat down to lunch with Enrico Fermi and his bomb-building buddies to ask a fundamental question about intelligent civilizations in the universe:
"Where are they?" — Enrico Fermi
That discussion sent us tripping past the Drake Equation, recent exoplanet discoveries, past possible answers for Fermi's question and along a particular trail that wrapped our lack of ETs with a bigger idea. But the take-away from the first ... issue? article? ... Let's go with
episode. The take-away from Episode 1 is that we really should see some sign of other civilizations out there. And we don't.
In Episode 2, we dropped in on scientist-philosopher Nick Bostrom to look at an idea that's almost as frightening as it is unimaginable:
"We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation." — Nick Bostrom
It's a conclusion that not many people want to accept (and I certainly didn't manage to sell the idea to the great mass of the DK comment-creating community). But the basic thought here is really pretty simple: if it is possible to create a simulated reality then it's possible to create many, we seem to be pretty close to being able to create such a simulation, if civilizations survive much longer than ours, then they should be able to create a lot of simulated realities.
So, whether you want to buy either of these initial conditions, just take them for now so we can move on: 1) we have an alien shortage and 2) we're probably just a sim.
That may seem like a lot to swallow already. But I'm counting on this guy to provide us with a little info about the nature of that sim.
Notice: not babies in those cages
Skinner would have likely hated the whole simulation argument. After all, the basis of his research was that mind didn't exist as some abstract concept, but developed as a result of interactions with the physical world.
"The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the observer's own body." — B. F. Skinner
Skinner's ideas were counter to the "metalism" viewpoint that treated the mind as a sort of abstract homunculus running the body via remote control. His views on how people thought were solidly rooted in how they reacted and interacted. That's why he was so fixated on giving things a metaphorical poke to see which way they jumped. This guy, with his boxes full of birds and rats and his idea that the mind was more about evolution than philosophy, may not seem to play much into the problems of our alien shortage, or the nature of our simulated reality. But I'm counting on him to inform us on both.
And it goes like this...
Part 1
- All the math suggests that the universe should be, if not filled, at least adequately stocked with intelligent civilizations.
- While crossing light-year distances may be daunting for living beings, any civilization that reaches even our humble level is capable of sending a probe to another star, albeit slowly.
- Given sufficient time, even a single civilization could send such probes to every star in the galaxy. If multiple civilizations are involved, probes should be very common.
- There's no reason to think that human beings are early players on the stage. There should be many places where intelligent life could have evolved much sooner, giving other races millions, if not billions, of years head start on doing that filling-galaxy task.
- Evidence of intelligent life in the universe should be abundant and obvious.
- Result: either technological civilizations invariably, not often, but in-frickin'-variably, do themselves in before they get very old, or our inability to identify other intelligences in the galaxy is a serious sign that something very basic is wrong.
Part 2
- A civilization not much more technologically advanced than our own should be able to convincingly simulate reality.
- If a civilization can simulate reality once, there's no discernible obstacle to keep them from doing it any number of times.
- Because of this, the number of simulated realities outnumber the number of "base" realities by a value close as you want to infinite.
- Any reality you find yourself in is extremely likely to be simulated.
- All that's required is that civilizations, any civilization, reach the ability to generate simulated realities.
Result: There really are only two choices. Either we're in a simulated reality, or civilizations invariably don't live very long, because we're not far from being able to simulate reality ourselves.
See how that point of "or civilizations don't last long" keeps coming up? It should worry you. It should really worry you. I'm serious about that.
Part 3
- Any good scientific experiment attempts to limit the number of uncontrolled variables.
- To test the relationship of a particular stimulus on behavior, it's important to limit the number of external stimuli.
- The point of Skinner's boxes was not just to test the subjects, but to isolate them so they could be studied in relationship to particular stimuli.
- Skinner boxes weren't made for people, but for creatures we regarded as appropriate test subjects such as rats and pigeons.
- People don't like to see people put into uncomfortable, difficult, or even brutal test environments by scientists. They limit that kind of thing to shows that run on Discovery Channel.
Result: We are part of a simulated environment that purposely excludes signs of other civilizations. The simulation may be designed to see how a civilization develops in isolation. Isolation may only be a factor in a more obscure design. In either case, we're in the civilizational equivalent of a Skinner Box (not an Air Crib). Most likely this box was created by a non-human intelligence, because while a more advanced form of humans might be interested in simming their backward cousins, I'd like to think they're not interested in hosting a sim based around raising those cousins in a limiting, crippling environment.
In other words, I can buy the idea that we're in a simulated reality, but I don't want to believe that other humans are behind a simulation that includes cancer, starving children, and Under the Dome. The authors of this mess have to be far enough removed from us to regard us as appropriate test subjects. Pigeons in a box.
See? Alien computer bastards. Or more properly, alien scientific programmer bastards.
And you better hope that's the case, because the alternative is ... yet again, and with appropriate bolding, DOOM. Yes, we're back to either it's a sim or civilizations just don't last that long. In fact, the alternative is even more dire. It's civilizations die right around where we are now.
Because if this is not a sim, then it's unlikely that we will survive to make a sim, and that seems just around the corner. Plus, if this not a sim, and there are no artifacts of other civilizations around, it seems that no civilization survives to create interstellar probes, another technology that isn't far outside our reach.
There is another possibility. Maybe life is much more difficult to generate than we believe. Maybe conditions in the rest of galaxy are so hard that no life arises, or if it does, that life never survives long enough to evolve intelligence. Maybe the answer to that N way back there in the Drake Equation is 1. Maybe we are completely alone in the universe.
But buck up. We are probably contained within the desktop of cruel, alien overlords. That's the good news.
There's another possible reason for our alien shortage even if this a simulation. Maybe this civilization isolation wasn't a core part of the design. Maybe we don't see aliens because this simulation was never designed to live so long. Maybe the question we were made to answer was very simple. Like "how will they get along with Neaderthals?" or even "can you get by with just two hands and five fingers?"
If the programmer in charge of the place already got the big 42 they were after, shouldn't we be subject to the cosmic off switch at any moment? Maybe. Maybe not.
Science fiction writer Iain M. Banks explored the logical limits of simulated realities in some of his "Culture" novels. In them, the vastly intelligent artificial intelligences behind the Culture warn about the dangers of simming reality too closely. Sometimes, in order to solve a problem about what people are going to do, you need to simulate people. If you can simulate them with a stack of statistics, fine, run the numbers, get your answer, and pitch the code. But if gaining the insight you want requires simulating individuals with individual wants, desires and dreams, then you're in a bit of a pickle. You may get your answer, but can you really condone turning off the sim once the numbers are in? If a simulated person has thoughts and dreams as complex as one in the real-reality, aren't you sort of obligated not to commit simulated genocide by turning off the system?
Maybe the marketing gurus at Galactic Nike have already discerned that, yes, otherwise apparently intelligent creatures will actually spent a significant portion of the income on a garish pair of sneakers. But now that they have their answer, they feel obligated to keep us around. Maybe they toss a few new things at us now and then (salted caramel! kale!) just to test some theories and wring a little more value out of the sim.
So maybe we are a sim dedicated to answering some specific question within rather narrow constraints, but cheer up; that doesn't mean that life can't still be pointless.
Now go be kind to a pigeon.