Simulating Consciousness

They have already simulated life in a computer program, and as we have posited before in another post, consciousness is often thought of as the software running on top of the brains hardware, and a by-product of the evolution of the human mind.  If this turns out to be correct idea in absolutist terms, that means that we should be able to simulate life in software, and since the constituents of life would then contain inherent potential for consciousness in the raw materiels, that this life would retain the subjective nature of the I after created, such as humanity, and probably all of the higher functioning animals.
Now before we go down the rabbit-hole (I would like to devote another page to this concept as well..) of a posible 'Matrix' universe, in which we all might be the aforementioned consciousness masses living inside a simulation -- because we would not know any better, it would seem real -- I would like to diverge into an article I came across that I found very interesting so I am going to cite a portion here.  The author uses Descarte's idea that the outside world could be a hoax, orchestrated by another party, and again, we would not know any different.

"During the last few centuries, physical science has convincingly answered so many questions about the nature of things, and so hugely increased our abilities, that many see it as the only legitimate claimant to the title of true knowledge. Other belief systems may have social utility for the groups that practice them, but ultimately they are just made-up stories. I myself am partial to such ``physical fundamentalism.''

Physical fundamentalists, however, must agree with René Descartes that the world we perceive through our senses could be an elaborate hoax. In the seventeenth century Descartes considered the possibility of an evil demon who created the illusion of an external reality by controlling all that we see and hear (and feel and smell and taste). In the twenty-first century, physical science itself, through the technology of virtual reality, will provide the means to create such illusions. Enthusiastic video gamers and other cybernauts are already strapping themselves into virtual reality goggles and body suits for brief stints in made-up worlds whose fundamental mechanisms are completely different from the quantum fields that (best evidence suggests) constitute our physical world.

Today's virtual adventurers do not fully escape the physical world: if they bump into real objects, they feel real pain. That link may weaken when direct connections to the nervous system become possible, leading perhaps to the old science-fiction idea of a living brain in a vat. The brain would be physically sustained by life-support machinery, and mentally by connections of all the peripheral nerves to an elaborate simulation of not only a surrounding world but also a body for the brain to inhabit. Brain vats might be medical stopgaps for accident victims with bodies damaged beyond repair, pending the acquisition, growth, or manufacture of a new body.

The virtual life of a brain in a vat can still be subtly perturbed by external physical, chemical, or electrical effects impinging on the vat. Even these weak ties to the physical world would fade if the brain, as well as the body, was absorbed into the simulation. If damaged or endangered parts of the brain, like the body, could be replaced with functionally equivalent simulations, some individuals could survive total physical destruction to find themselves alive as pure computer simulations in virtual worlds.

A simulated world hosting a simulated person can be a closed self-contained entity. It might exist as a program on a computer processing data quietly in some dark corner, giving no external hint of the joys and pains, successes and frustrations of the person inside. Inside the simulation events unfold according to the strict logic of the program, which defines the ``laws of physics'' of the simulation. The inhabitant might, by patient experimentation and inference, deduce some representation of the simulation laws, but not the nature or even existence of the simulating computer. The simulation's internal relationships would be the same if the program were running correctly on any of an endless variety of possible computers, slowly, quickly, intermittently, or even backwards and forwards in time, with the data stored as charges on chips, marks on a tape, or pulses in a delay line, with the simulation's numbers represented in binary, decimal, or Roman numerals, compactly or spread widely across the machine. There is no limit, in principle, on how indirect the relationship between simulation and simulated can be."
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A bit further down, there is a new section that is called Universal Existance, and it poses some interesting thoughts as well.

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Universal Existence

Perhaps the most unsettling implication of this train of thought is that anything can be interpreted as possessing any abstract property, including consciousness and intelligence. Given the right playbook, the thermal jostling of the atoms in a rock can be seen as the operation of a complex, self-aware mind. How strange. Common sense screams that people have minds and rocks don't. But interpretations are often ambiguous. One day's unintelligible sounds and squiggles may become another day's meaningful thoughts if one masters a foreign language in the interim. Is the Mount Rushmore monument a rock formation or four presidents' faces? Is a ventriloquist's dummy a lump of wood, a human simulacrum, or a personality sharing some of the ventriloquist's body and mind? Is a video game a box of silicon bits, an electronic circuit flipping its own switches, a computer following a long list of instructions, or a large three-dimensional world inhabited by the Mario Brothers and their mushroom adversaries? Sometimes we exploit offbeat interpretations: an encrypted message is meaningless gibberish except when viewed through a deliberately obscure decoding. Humans have always used a modest multiplicity of interpretations, but computers widen the horizons. The first electronic computer was developed by Alan Turing to find ``interesting'' interpretations of wartime messages radioed by Germany to its U-boats. As our thoughts become more powerful, our repertoire of useful interpretations will grow. We can see levers and springs in animal limbs, and beauty in the aurora: our ``mind children'' may be able to spot fully functioning intelligences in the complex chemical goings on of plants, the dynamics of interstellar clouds, or the reverberations of cosmic radiation. No particular interpretation is ruled out, but the space of all of them is exponentially larger than the size of individual ones, and we may never encounter more than an infinitesimal fraction. The rock-minds may be forever lost to us in the bogglingly vast sea of mindlessly chaotic rock-interpretations. Yet those rock-minds make complete sense to themselves, and to them it is we who are lost in meaningless chaos. Our own nature, in fact, is defined by the tiny fraction of possible interpretations we can make, and the astronomical number we can't."

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Because there is quite a bit to the article cited above, and the author delves into off-topic -- although interesting -- I did not cite it here.  I would really recommend reading the entirety of the text, which can be found by following the link in the sources section at the bottom of this piece.
I hope this has helped to spur discussion on the potential for simulating a conscious reality, subjective to the recipient brain, or other operating environment.

Marshall


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Image Source: http://www.leftyparent.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Human-Consciousness-225x300.jpg
Text Source Cited: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html