I always knew I was the product of a deranged imagination … at least the sex is good.
Oh, on a different topic does anybody have change for a Ningi?
4 Likes
2 Likes
They know this already.
Unlike headline writers, they don’t over generalize what their paper means. New kinds of computation (they don’t say it, but I think they mean quantum computers) or new algorithms (ie not random sampling) that work around sign cancelling when searching the program space would mean that we are still likely in a simulation.
It could also be that the simulation is written in such a way that the solution to some of these problems is simply not available to us (what Cory alluded to in his title).
Simulation theory posits beings much more advanced than ourselves. To claim that simulation is not possible with current technology and understanding is one thing, to say it’s not possible at all is just a silly argument. These beings might exist in a higher order universe, in which case simulating ours would be quite simple.
1 Like
Fun fact: If this really is a simulation, the creationists are technically correct.
1 Like
Oh, so YOU’RE the one who had his terror and suspicion stats pumped up to 100.
1 Like
Let’s not forget that none of this “universe” stuff exists unless somebody is looking at it.
Also, the “universe” that serves as a substrate for a simulation is not the “universe” inside that simulation. Conway’s Game of Life requires more than just the pixels in the game to make it work.
In most cases that I’ve seen it stated, though, I’ve seen it stated as, “(not 1) and (not 2), therefore conclude 3” which is a logically equivalent argument that does arrive at #3 through a chain of reasoning, just a chain of reasoning with two more premises than Bostrom had.
This article points out that even as formulated by Bostrom the argument is dead wrong. It could be that 1, 2 and 3 are all false and that “(4) It’s not possible to simulate a reality like ours” is true. I suppose you could put this in as a subset of (1), but I generally take “very close to zero” to not include zero.
2 Likes
all these brain in a vat/living in a simulation scenarios entail that mental content is narrow (that the content of your thoughts is determined solely by what’s in your head). However, there are very good reasons to hold that mental content is wide (that the content of your thoughts is not solely determined by what’s in your head but includes what your thoughts refer to). See Putnam’s twin earth argument and Kripke “Naming and Necessity”.
If that guy’s so smart, how come his sweater* is full of holes?
*Sweater #2.
why is it foreordained that computer science will eventually attain the power to simulate whole universes, including autonomous, conscious beings?
As I understand simulation theory, it is more like that matter is the product of a turing machine. It does not have anything to do with aliens or future humans, using giant silicon machines. That is a naive interpretation - it’s like saying that the big bang is non-falsifiable because there were no explosives back then or anyone to detonate them. It anthropomorphises the problem.
No - therefore I do not - generally speaking - exist at all.
Depends what you mean by computing. Matter itself could be said to be “computing” its own location. The “atoms” are the emergent property of this process. And yes, some physical models do indeed imply being coordinated by means outside of all the atoms in the universe, such as implicate structures, higher-order dimensions, or nonlocalities.
I am sure there are some cogent arguments against simulation, but these examples are really silly.
2 Likes
My perceptions are simulations of reality. My brain edits out heaps of reality and I get the tiniest sliver of what “reality” is, my brain interprets the sensory input and creates a simulation I can comprehend. So in a sense I am living in a simulation whether the universe is a simulation or not.
5 Likes
Spoken like a true OO programmer.
2 Likes
No, they didn’t falsify the simulated universe hypothesis. You can’t; it’s unfalsifiable. (Who’s to say that the simulating universe has any particular properties.) That’s part of what makes it such a useless idea.
3 Likes
I think that you know that this is wrong. A frequentist would say that the probability is 1 or 0 after the first event.
1 Like
The most satisfying takedown of the simulation hypothesis, for me at least, is that it involves a mistake in type.
If you were simulating the sun, is there any amount of data you could track about the particles, reactions and forces involved that would lead to the simulation being in some way describable as hot? Most people would say no, because heat is a physical quality and no amount of pure, recorded data in a simulation can create it.
If you were simulating a hurricane, is there any amount of information, any level of granularity after which the simulation becomes wet, or windy? Or is it just information about a wet, windy event? Again, it seems unreasonable to say that a simulation takes on a physical property.
So, if you can simulate every neurological exchange going on in a human brain, knowing not just its state at any given time but also how that state will change, and even what thoughts and feelings those changes correspond to in the physical world, would anything about that simulation be conscious? Assuming consciousness is in some way akin to hotness or wetness (which I know not everyone will agree with, but which I accept as a premise), nothing in the simulation would be conscious.
A simulated reality doesn’t contain heat, or wetness, or consciousness. Since I am conscious, I’m not in a simulation. Works for me.
Red pill, blue pill… meh.
How about this… paisley pill?
Pretty sure this is running our current simulation.
I say it’s time to reformat…
The simulation argument is just a modern day attempt to prove the existence of God (an entity that would easily fit many ideas of God). It’s interesting that people are still working on novel ways to do this, but the argument isn’t more convincing than the ontological argument or the proof from design.
The proof in the article doesn’t actually prove we’re not a simulation because we can’t speculate about the complexity of the simulating reality. As @LurkingGrue joked and I piled on above, maybe the simulating reality is complex in a way we can’t currently imagine that allows simulation.
But I think it does raise a great question: If someone believes the simulation argument, do they believe it’s turtles all the way up, or do they believe there is an actual base reality? And if each reality must be more complex than any reality it simulates, then we are speculating there is a maximally complex reality at the top. So saying we might be in a simulation is another way of saying, “I’m pretty sure this isn’t the maximally complex reality.”
At this point it’s pretty obvious why I liken it to a proof of the existence of God. It’s people looking around at the world saying, “This can’t be all there is, can it?!?”
10 Likes
doubling with every new particle is 2^n, not n^2.
1 Like
That seems like a pretty inexcusable oversight. Cory… wtf?
