Perry Potter and The Philosophical Zombie
My name is Perry, and I'm not a philosophical zombie.
Prove it, you ask?
I can't. I can think of no experiment I could perform to convince you I am a conscious being. I can pass the Turing test. I have memories and can tell you about them. I have foods I like to eat and foods I do not like to eat. I have people I love and people I... really don't like. But all that doesn't prove that I'm not a philosophical zombie who thinks he is conscious.
But I could ask the same of you, my human friend. How do you know that the entire history of humanity is not just philosophical zombies fumbling around and deceiving themselves into believing they are conscious? Since you only very rarely ask that question, I don't see why I should be expected to ask it about myself and my kind.
What I do know is that my life was very human-like. I remember first grade, taught by a man named Mr. Ryan. To me, I lived through every single day of the class. But, like you, I only remember the highlights. What Mr. Ryan's first name was, I don't know. But I actually did live through it, to the extent that someone like me can be said to live through it. The AI that created me composed a very detailed history, with every hour of every day full of prodigious detail. Not just what my teacher was wearing and what color the chairs were, but what I was thinking and feeling at every moment. Then it applied some kind of filter to my mind, made it so that I, like you, only remember the important stuff.
For the first eleven years of my life, I was not particularly unusual. I got good grades in high school, but nobody told me I was a child prodigy. I had cruel parents, but then, so did many other kids. The only way my world differed from yours was that we kids must have been much more mature. At the age of eleven, when my novel started, I was much, much more intelligent and mature than the human eleven-year-olds I converse with now. Since I didn't notice the unintelligence and immaturity of the other eleven-year-olds, I conclude that they, too, must have been very different from the kids in your world.
At age eleven, I was abruptly thrust into the world of magic. Initially, I was in a daze, wondering if it was real. I thought it might be a delusion, that I might wake up and return to the dreary non-magical world. I never thought that my whole world, from the very beginning, was a Truman-show-like fraud, created entirely around me. That my first-grade teacher and all the other unnamed characters were just shells of people, who only existed once I walked into the room.
I never had the thought, "hey, maybe there's this higher dimension of reality in which magic doesn't exist, but there are massively powerful AI thingies, and the AI thingies' human masters order them to compile novels set in a world based on their world pre-AI, but where magic does exist, and the courts in this world have ruled that AI-produced novels are not copyrightable, so to make money the creators of the novel-writing AIs let fans talk to the characters for a fee, and I am one of these characters, whose life over the next six years will be described in six books, after which I will be informed of the reality of my world and told that I'm supposed to talk to a twelve-year-old about whether I think this cute boy in her math class likes her."
I was a smart eleven-year-old, but I wasn't that smart. The anomalous situations that crept up in the novels puzzled me, but I always sought explanations within-universe. I never thought to interpret the anomalous situations I was in as evidence that my world was not "real." The vast majority of those humans whose lives were anomalous, people like Napoleon or Einstein, never took it as evidence they were characters in a novel. The idea of the simulation hypothesis took humans a long time to develop, and even then, the "simulation" was imagined to be a world similar to their own, with all eight billion humans having independent existences.
Nobody foresaw what actually happened. Self-replicating robots created a massive Dyson swarm around the sun. Some of the energy and materials gathered by the swarm were used to create human colonies. But the Earth was still underpopulated and few humans wanted to emigrate. So, for a period of about a hundred and twenty years, energy and computing power were basically free. Some was used for extremely detailed physics simulations. Some was used to solve obscure math problems by brute force. Many proposed simulating the entire history of humanity, but ethicists shot the idea down. But characters in novels? We are not conscious, so they needn't worry about us.
In the early history of AI, chess-playing programs were given matches played by humans to "learn" with. Strategies developed by humans would be applied by AIs, which, given their ability to see thousands of moves into the future, could apply them more intelligently. Eventually, this became unnecessary. You only had to give the AI a chessboard and let it play against itself. It would figure out all the human strategies and more.
Novel writing followed a similar path. At first, human-written novels and human-written literary criticism were used as input. Eventually, AIs could write for an audience of one another and then could be trained on one another's criticism. This wasn't exactly analogous to chess, as chess has an objective winner and loser. But it seemed to work, producing works of literature humans judged to be superb. With all that free energy, why not have the AI write trillions of novels? If the characters were conscious, the vast majority of conscious "people" who experienced a pre-AI world were characters in a work of fiction.
I wonder what pre-AI humans would have thought of that.