I realise that, but in the words of Arthur C. Clarke;
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
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But ACC appreciated that this did not mean it was actual magic.
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Well, that’s because there’s no such thing. Even if a god existed, his powers would manifest through the physical. We would call it magic, but it would just be physical processes that we didn’t yet understand.
I get your point though.
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I’m not sure that the sky-fairy followers would accept that such understanding was only a matter of time - without, that is, undergoing some elevation to the higher plane presided over by said divinity (heaven/valhalla etc). Surely the whole point of divine magic is that it remains eternally inexplicable to the non-divine on the lower plane (and possibly even on the higher one - who the hell knows what they think 
). This is quite a different (set of) universe(s) from the simulations that we are - I presume - talking about.
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I get where you’re coming from, I really do, but this statement:
fulfills the simulation theory equally well.
If it’s all a simulation, and we’re just simulations, then the simulators may well be capable of all sorts of things that would appear ‘magic’ if we could comprehend them.
Comparing simulation vs god, is the same as comparing god vs reincarnation, or magic vs wishes, or whichever other criteria you wish to fill in.
If it’s all outside our natural existence then it doesn’t matter what the ‘external’ is.
Yeah. I know. But I really don’t want the simulaverse to be just another tawdry explanation for a Gawd.
But that’s my point. I don’t believe it is the same. You don’t need a deity to explain a series of embedded simulations, no matter how magical or divine each may appear to its underworlder. The ‘top’ (assuming there is one - or tops, if there is an entire ordered poset of 'em) could have evolved naturally, in all its/their complexity, just like we suppose ours has.
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I based the physics on current best black hole and cosmological models. Since the prevailing paradigm in cosmology a mere twenty years ago was the Big Crunch, the Accelerating Universe could also, of course, be wrong. Skepticism and doubt are the sword and shield of science. It should be taken as the default that all hypotheses are subject to them. Since I didn’t say otherwise, doubt should be the assumption, especially on the part of any other scientist.
As for Deep Time civilizations, if they’re not there, then that particular version of the simulation argument fails. Though the simpler version, that it’s easier to run simulations than bodies if and when the technological capability for upload or general purpose AI is achieved, and that civilizations spend more time at that level than not, and that evolution therefore favors simulations, is independent of the total time those civilizations exist. That’s the basic form of Nick Bostrom’s version of the argument, sans cosmology. It too is based on assumptions that may be wrong. This is why it’s called a hypothesis.
First, this ignores the possibility of a reality in which simulations naturally emerge without conscious midwives, a Blind Watchmaker simulator, which is a third form of the argument. Second, while I’m atheistic regarding deities, which are human projections, I’m agnostic on the hypothesis that something recognizably conscious was involved in the origin or shaping of the universe we inhabit. The question is whether it’s a non-falsifiable hypothesis. If it is, then it’s not science and we can safely leave it to the philosophers. But we won’t know if it is unless we investigate to see if we can find any evidence.
I get three things from that sentence, so I’m going to unpack them separately.
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That an idea is used in fiction is never a good argument against investigating it, and indeed any argument that it is sounds irrationally biased.
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I agree that it behooves us to be careful to make clear:
2a) The limits of our knowledge.
2b) That these are hypotheses, not tested theories, and that the difference between Aristotelian science and the vastly more successful Enlightenment scientific method is the insistence on empirical confirmation, not the reliance on abstract reasoning.
- We are not responsible for the willful disregard of the scientific method by quacks, and the fear that quacks will selectively pick and choose what they want to hear should not censor scientists from exploring the kinds of bizarre ideas that quacks like to embrace uncritically. To blame science for quackery puts the onus in the wrong place. It is the responsibility of the public and the education system to instill critical thinking skills, not scientists to avoid talking about ideas that credulous minds will swallow without questioning them.
One small correction, we are in the stelliferous epoch, albeit the very early days. Most of it will be dominated by red, white and black dwarfs, based on current best astrophysical models. And see, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Qualifying every single last statement with based on current best models is absurd. This is science. That’s what it is. I don’t tack on based on mathematics every time I write an equation.
While this gets into the philosophy of science, rather than science itself, this is not really correct. Supernatural is a nonsensical word. The physical laws of our world are not supernatural to your computer’s video game’s physics engine, the engine is merely part of a larger natural world.
ETA: Lest I seem dismissive or hostile to your point-of-view, I’m not. I agree and share your frustration with the promulgation of new-age pseudoscience. But I do not believe the solution should be for science and scientists to walk on eggshells lest we inadvertently inspire some starry-eyed mystic to misinterpret strange hypotheses as support for their mumbo jumobo. I believe the answer is to teach science and scientific thinking, even and especially to non-scientists. We expect every kid to learn Algebra, when only a minority will have use of or remember it. But most public school science classes focus on teaching scientific results, not scientific thinking. I honestly believe this oversight is the single biggest factor responsible for things like climate change denialism and the anti-vaxxer movement. Yes, shysters are at the root of these movements, but a lack of scientific thinking or understanding about how science works is the soil in which these turd blossoms flourish.
Oh, and I forgot: Hawking radiation can’t currently evaporate stellar mass or above black holes. Small black holes emit much higher frequency band Hawking radiation (under current mainstream black hole theory, sigh), but the rate of emission of large holes is so low that the radiation pressure of the cosmic microwave background is actually hotter, and so large holes must wait until the expansion of the universe attenuates the CMBR enough for there to be a net loss at their horizon. So for now any large holes are growing, even if they have no accretion cloud.
Another interesting feature of this model is that, as the black hole’s horizon shrinks, the accelerating expansion of space (if it continues) will shrink it’s particle event horizon (the distance beyond which particles are being dragged away by the expansion too fast to influence it even at the speed of light) until the particle horizon, which is in effect the black hole’s visible universe, joins with the black hole’s own shrinking gravitational event horizon.
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I haven’t read these yet, but Baxter is phennomenal. His worke with Clarke was excellent.
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Like, like, likety like.
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One of the things that stymies my meager brain is… How do we test if we are in a simulation if we don’t know the rules outside of it? The part that I am most sceptical about seems to be the bias that we are simulating ourselves. While I am indeed a hoopy frood, the universe only needs one of me. And I know that, so I wouldn’t simulate me… Unless it was a particularly sick dare.
And now that I think about it, the universe being created on a random drunk dare starts to make sense.
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But all that means is that - according to a second theory - you have already simulated yourself.
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Wanted to add that Peter Watts wrote an excellent short story about a woman that learns to manipulate the simulation in his collection ‘Beyond the Rift’. I can’t remember the name, but I wouldn’t say if I did, because the whole collection is A+ and deserves to be read.
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The only way I can think of is to look for inconsistencies in our own universe, at least with regards to simulation as we know it. Of course even if we find it inconsistencies, we can never be entirely sure it’s a consequences of bugs. Indeed, that our theories are wrong would be a simpler and therefor more likely answer. Science is the uncompromising application of doubt and skepticism. Certainty is not scientific, it’s faith.
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Thank you for making my point better and more succinct than me. That’s why I pay you the big bucks.
My mom always told me to stop simulating myself at the dinner table.
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And again, to echo what I said above. A simulation and it’s simulator and it’s simulator’s reality are not really separate natural rules. If the laws of nature are different inside the simulation, then the project is to find the rules governing the substrate, not the programming. Whether that’s even possible we don’t know, but we don’t know it isn’t either.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that you and I and @pixleshifter are correct, that we’re not in a simulation as we know it. Investigating the question still has significance in my field, computational physics, and in the tangentially related field of AI, because the answers could help us better understand the limits of what we ourselves can and cannot simulate.
So there really might be big bucks in it, even if we’re in so-called base reality. …holds out palm and rubs fingers together
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That I don’t doubt at all. The biggest discoveries aren’t when someone shouted Eureka, but when they mumbled, That’s Odd. Probing inconsistencies is exciting!
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This could be rephrased ‘civilizations that lasted into and adapted into the black hole evap epoch’. After all, a) they’ll see it coming b) have plenty of time to prepare c) likely be far removed from any technology we are even able to conceive of at our present stage of development (which could be an unreliable assumption based on what I say next).
One thing I’m curious about: How can we draw inferrences about the simulator based on the simulation, since it would not necessarily be bound by any objective laws? For instance, the conventional argument recounted by GulliverFoyle relied upon the assumption that human consciousness required approx. 1% of a single watt (and that was a necessary fact for the soundness of the efficiency argument). But if in fact we are software and not cells, how can we trust that figure?
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I’m not clicking that.
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I have a kid, damn it; I already suffered through hearing it it once in the movie theater. Never again.
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