Harry and Luna Discuss Philosophy for Some Reason (Omake)

"This feels like the start of a new chapter", Luna stated.

Padma asked, "You mean, like things are changing? I remember feeling like that when I first came to Hogwarts."

"I meant the story that we're in just turned a page and started a new chapter, with a new number and title and everything. It's odd though; I'm not sure what the number is."

"Luna, this isn't a story. This is the real world", Hermione said slowly.

Luna looked at Hermione and tilted her head, "What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?"

Harry smiled, showing his teeth, then added, "Heroes and villains with magic and monsters and in a castle and with noble titles; it sounds like a story, doesn't it."

Hermione frowned at Harry, "You're not having trouble with the difference between reality and fantasy are you? Because you getting schizophrenia would be really, really bad."

"If you're living in a story, then the story is real to you", Luna added helpfully.

Padma shook her head, "No, no, no, no, no. It was bad enough last week when Harry tried to convince us we're probably all living inside of a muggle computer; don't you start trying to convince us we're fictional characters."

Harry lectured, "That's the result of a straightforward application of Bayes' Rule, with some reasonable assumptions about a mature civilization's ability to simulate intelligent beings and the number of simulated intelligences that would be created by a typical civilization, both directly and recursively. And when the existence of magic is added to the calculation, it raises the probability that all of this is a simulation even more."

Luna replied, "And what happens to that calculation when you use the number of stories and characters instead of simulations and simulated people? I think there are more of those."

"That's different; the characters in stories aren't conscious like we are", Hermione challenged.

"So you're an expert on detecting consciousness now?" Harry teased. "Then tell me, is there something so special about calcium ion channels and neurotransmitters?"

Hermione sighed, "I guess I could believe that a simulation could be conscious, but not a fictional character."

"So then, if you're okay with a conscious mind based on meat or one based on silicon, does it matter if the computer is made of something else; vacuum tubes or electromagnetic relays, for example?"

"I suppose not."

"Then what about something more exotic? It's been proposed that in any given universe Boltzmann brains will vastly outnumber evolved intelligences. They're created by quantum fluctuations in cold gas that randomly happen to produce a self-aware entity for the short period of time they remain intact."

"You don't really believe that, do you?" Padma asked. Hermione also looked skeptical.

Harry waved dismissively, "Then forget that. Take the computer simulation and imagine that, instead of a physical computer, there's a person doing the calculations, whether they're encoding the results with a pencil and paper or maybe by lining up rocks in an extremely large plain."

Hermione looked thoughtful, "Maybe the rule should be that conscious entities can use any physical structure, unless it requires another conscious entity; then its thoughts are really part of that entity's consciousness."

"That doesn't work", Harry replied. "Imagine you're doing a pencil-and-paper simulation of two entities having a conversation in Chinese. You don't know Chinese, right? You could simulate the entire conversation without having any idea what it was about. So those entities' thoughts wouldn't exist in your own mind."

"Oh. That's just strange. I don't think it's right."

"I think part of the problem is that it's easy to imagine consciousness being located inside of a brain or even a processor, but it's hard to imagine consciousness located on a piece of paper or in a graphite smudge."

Hermione nodded.

"But you could simulate an entity using multiple computers networked together; for example, with its visual cortex in one country and a cell cluster from its left frontal lobe in another. Any time you believed you knew where the conscious part was, you could physically separate those calculations and repeat until each computer simulated a single cell. Or atom. It's an error to picture consciousness located at any specific physical location."

Hermione replied, "I don't know. Something has to be wrong with that; I just haven't thought of what yet."

Padma concluded, "I think you're all nuts. I'm going to assume only humans and human-like creatures can be intelligent or conscious until I meet something else that acts like it."

"It is difficult to picture the causal relationship between writing numbers on paper and a conscious entity's thoughts. So maybe simulating the math at a low level isn't really necessary; maybe it's enough to develop a universe and a character and write their thoughts and behavior."

"Where and how are you drawing a line between the plausible and the ridiculous scenarios you've mentioned? Or do you think everything is conscious, and that Luna's right that we're more likely to be in a story than in real life?"

"It does seem silly that fictional characters (or pencil-and-paper simulated entities) would produce consciousness. Maybe it's all about the mathematics; for any mathematically consistent universe that would produce intelligent beings, those beings are conscious and aware of that universe, whether anyone's simulating it or not. That also solves the problem of where everything came from: it doesn't have to come from anywhere, it just has to be logically consistent."

Padma shook her head, "I can't tell if you're being serious or not."

Harry smiled, "Yeah, I'm not really sure anymore."

"I'm not really sure, either", added the author.