What if Mother Nature is an AI?

There are a very large number of ways in which nature is identical or very similar to AI. Does the suspiciously large number of these similarities suggest that nature is, in fact, an AI? No, it does not. However, it does suggest that it is a very interesting topic to read and write about. Below you will find a non-exhaustive list of some of the similarities between nature and AI. You will also find, at the end of the piece, one way in which they are different. Unfortunately, this one thing left me feeling queasy the more I thought about it, and I have since tried to block it out of my mind. Hopefully you will have better luck than me in that regard.

How Nature is an AI

1. Nature, exactly like an AI, has no knowledge or wisdom. It simply is, it follows its “programming” providing the conditions for the universe and life to exist.

2. The programming of AIs is comprised of algorithms. Nature could be thought of as being programmed as well. The universal laws of nature are the algorithms of which it is comprised (e.g. Newton's laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation, Einstein's theory of relativity, and the laws of thermodynamics)

3. An AI’s programming restricts what it can and cannot do in ways that are inviolable. It also defines exactly what it must do. It cannot do anything other than that. Exactly like an AIs programming, the laws of nature (the program) of nature restrict what nature can and cannot do, what can and cannot happen, in ways that are inviolable.

4. The code that makes up an AI’s algorithms/program is computer code. The code that makes up the universal laws of nature could be thought of as the fundamental building blocks of nature e.g. subatomic/quantum particles, strings, etc.

5. An AI has no ethics, though we program AI (I hope) with an ethic to mirror our own (e.g. prohibitions against killing or lying or stealing, etc.). Nature has no ethics (see below for one possible exception.) Does anyone program nature? If they do they have no such prohibitions or have not included them in nature’s program because nature has no prohibitions at all other than those things not allowed by the universal laws of nature.

6. Exactly like an AI, nature wants nothing. Both are incapable of wanting

How Nature is Not an AI

1. Unlike an AI which values nothing, nature values one thing very highly, or perhaps values it the most highly, and that thing is life. biological life. We know this because one of the fundamental forces, the evolutionary force, has only one purpose and that is the continuation/propagation of life. It does this without any ethics of its own in ways that humans might find morally repugnant e.g. the deaths of billions of one sort of lifeform for the propagation of only a few of another sort. Yet it does always seek the continuation of life unlike AI which seeks nothing other than what its programming tells it to seek. Let’s hope we are as smart as mother nature’s programmer(s) appear to have been.

Nature as AI and the simulation hypothesis

All of this leads us straight to the simulation hypothesis, which, if true, would suggest that we humans are all AIs and that we and the universe in which we reside are nothing more than the output of a program being run inside a quantum computer of near infinite power. According to Simulationist orthodoxy the simulation was created/programmed by something(s) they refer to as the Simulator(s). The Simulators are not Gods but have what we might consider God-like powers and are the programmers of nature. We are a part of that programming, but as intelligent beings also capable of becoming aware of it. The Simulationists refer to those who have become aware of the simulated nature of our existence as the woke people, and the process of becoming one of the awoke is called simulational submersion or transsubsimulation, borrowing from the catholic notion of transubstantiation. We are now creating our own AI which may help us understand our role as simulated beings in a simulated universe or usher in a utopian age where man is free to eventually become like the simulators who created him and create their own simulated universe populated with simulated beings they have created. Some Simulationists believe this has already happened and has happened many times. They believe we exist within only one of many or perhaps a near infinite number of levels of the original simulation. The members of this group call themselves multilevel simulationists and liken themselves to those physicists and cosmologists who have proposed and continue to argue for multiverse theories of our own (what they believe to be real) universe.