 Next, we'll hear from Julio 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 world, space exploration, and future studies. He's especially interested in the convergence of science, technology, and spirituality. Speaking on the computational problem of evil. Okay, 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. But those who are not, where my email is here, I am on the MTA mailing list, and I'm always happy to talk. Okay, that is really an age-old question. If God is good and God is omnipotent, why does evil exist? I'm not going to be able to answer that. The philosophers have been discussing this for centuries, and we've gone for other centuries. I'm going to my base to try to give some hints of what the answer could be, if the concept of answer makes any sense, of course. This is a discussion that comes frequently when you talk with 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 it 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. How can we answer that? Well, the middle-aged philosophers who gave a lot of thought to these things had already formulated some kind of answers based on the concept that complete omnipotency is not as logically consistent as it seems. They used to make the example of the stone, so God is omnipotent. That means that God can make a stone, so not even a God can lift it. But hold on a moment, if God cannot lift the 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. A more modern but similar formulation of the concept is trying to answer the question can God draw a triangle with four sides? If God is omnipotent, then God should be able to, but a triangle with four sides cannot exist, because 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. That's the answer I wanted to hear anyway. I'm going to assume, not even assume, I'm going to consider the possibility that our reality is in some sense a computation happening in a higher level of reality. We are all familiar with video games, and we have 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 have 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. 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? 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 automaton, computation invented by John Conway some 40 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 reproduces the evolution of the cellular automata life itself, which means that if you feel the plane with many patterns like this, they are going to evolve like life itself. And the cell is going to be on or off depending on the presence or absence of a glider in this place. So this is a way to simulate the evolution of life within life itself. I can build a life computer within life. Of course, the price that I have 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. And this has some bearing on the possibility to predict what the future will be. Life is an example of irreducible computation in the sense that there are no computation 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 with 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 24 hours. Maybe that's why it was raining this morning. What does that mean? Well, I'm not going to demonstrate this. It's quite easy. It is almost self-evident to me. So not even God can compute what will happen in the future, even what is happening now, and the laws of physics with 100% absolute certainty, because that 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. There is perhaps one thing that God could do. He wants to know what will happen in our universe faster than letting it happen in order to prevent evil in our universe. Perhaps God could just use a faster computer. So this is an old computer. This is a new computer. It's a very last-generation gaming computer, very fast with a lot of computational power. It's going to take much less time to execute the same computation than this computer. But, well, it turns out that God cannot really do that, because we are talking a very complex computation that contains 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 if God wants that nobody suffers here and runs the computation on a faster computer, then somebody would suffer in the 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 God can or cannot do. Okay, let's take a look at some other example of things happening in the life universe. This is a universal Turing machine. Yes, there is a universal Turing machine in life. This is what happens if you leave the computation of this universal Turing machine running for 50,000 iterations. This is a very interesting system. They have the input, which is a description of another Turing machine as a stream of glider 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. 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 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. Let's see here. Okay, just push. No, that's not the thing I want to... You can't start with your own thoughts. Are you ready? Yeah. Okay. This is an example of this Turing machine running. It focuses on the 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... I empathize with what happens to these very little things in our simulated universe. It is a very simple thing. It can be going in four possible directions. It can have one of four faces along this path. So it can be in one of 16 possible configurations. Let's call these configuration mental states. Let's think that a glider has mental states. So maybe when the glider is going north-west, it's happy when it's going northeast, it's unhappy or something like that. The phase changes are 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. And let's see what happened in the life of Joe Glider. You see there are things that moves. 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 very bad will happen to this guy because it's going to have a collision with this other glider and it's going to be destroyed. You 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 genome side of gliders and I am playing the role of God here. And I want to do something to save the life of Joe Glider. 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. They 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. 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. Let's try to do something. Let's try to steer it continuously. Like I can drive my car in a city. I was driving a brand car last night. We were 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 if I steer it continuously all the time I can save this glider for any conceivable situation but Joe is not a glider anymore. The gliderness is gone. So whatever I had was called the Joe glider. Now I can only call it a non-glider so I can only call him non-Joe because it's not Joe anymore. Joe is dead. I've not been able to save Joe's life. So too many frequent invasive interventions. I had a nice gotical font here but it has gone. Too many frequent invasive interventions on an essential entity destroy the personal essence and self. Now shall not a puppet thinking things. This is another bit of a possible solution to the problem of everything. Now last but not least, whatever happens to Joe, whatever happens to any glider in this simulation is a part of a computation which is meant to do something. This computation is meant to go from here to here to generate some kind of answer to some kind of question. I don't know, perhaps all 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 it's 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 makes sense from another perspective. And I think that's it. Thank you very much.