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Obviously itâs possible the universe is a simulation. This notion is just a modified version of the old Omphalos hypothesis and shares many of the same philosophical and logical features.
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Obviously there is no certain way to test this hypothesis. A simulator-designer with inexplicably limited âresourcesâ who simply didnât care whether intelligence within the simulation could detect the seams might conceivably leave some âunnaturalâ or otherwise scientifically inexplicable traces, but the chain of assumptions that leads to this is implausible on the face of it, and really is appropriate only in fiction. At present our understanding of the universe is so limited that any apparent traces we could find would not have much meaning because of the likelihood that future scientific progress would discover these were in fact natural phenomena.
Edit: And oh yeah, Bostromâs silly notion (from the article) is completely unsupportable. The âmore likelyâ claim has no basis whatsoever in logic, mathematics, or reality.
Funny you should mention it, SimEntity #0000000004F38AC61039D14B922D04-Pescovitz. New ethics regulations in the real universe require us to inform you that you are, in fact, part of a simulation. (Not one of our better ones, Iâll admit, but all we need to know was how a large mammalian population at the low end of the Galactic Standard Intelligence Metric would react to an outbreak of Marghozian Blood Fever, so itâs not like we had to go into a lot of detail.)
Apparently the thinking among the administrators is that your consciousness could conceivably count as actual consciousness, so although I feel a bit silly hand-coding this message into your universe after itâs already been running for twenty full minutes, there you go. Itâs a fake. Youâre not real.
Fortunately for the integrity of the experiment, I only have to tell one SimEntity once. Still more fortunately, few of you will believe me. I was going to go the extra mile and code this message into one of your transcendental numbers, but the fever isnât going to leave you a lot of time for exploratory mathematics, so⌠anyway, cheers.
Yours for research (and, for what itâs worth, THE LORD YOUR GOD for all practical purposes),
Dr. Michael Kim
Associate Professor of Simulation
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the real one)
Not sure what theyâre on about re: asymmetries. Do they mean some kind of artefact of running a numerical simulation on a discrete grid?
Iâve heard/imagined other ideas for testing the simulation hypothesis. One thing to look for is any signs of intervention e.g. if a physical âconstantâ suddenly changed at some point in the past, because the simulation owner wanted to force the universe to evolve in some particular way. Maybe cosmic inflation fits the bill?
Alternatively, we can think about whoever is monitoring the simulation - perhaps our running around and kicking each other is the most interesting part of it. So we just need to put up some clearly visible protest signs, and refuse to move until they improve our living conditions.
Those two points remind me of this and this from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which has apparently devoted as much thought as anyone to this without taking it too seriously.
Please do not forget Rene Descartes who thought this idea up 300 years before your Sci Fi authors. As far as I know he is the first person to formulate the simulation hypothesis (in his version there was a djinn or a demon creating the simulation), but many philosophers as far back as at least 500 BC wondered about how we can know if we are dreaming or awake, which is essentially the same question.
If we are in a simulation, what happens once we die?
And wouldnât that scientist/programmer creator of that simulation equal to our God(s)?
And what would those damn atheists say if the simulation hypothesis is proved?
Nonsense.
Even if from your point of view this is âonlyâ a simulation, from our point of view, this is reality, because we are in it, and if we were to ignore it or try to break it, we would still be in it, and ignoring the world and/or breaking the world would be very. bad. for us.
Even if you think we should worship you, if you are experimenting with plagues on us, why should we worship you?
Not much of a demiurge.
If you had all the power in the world it wouldnât make me - or many of us - want to worship you. If you used what power you do have to try to do the right thing, to try to improve peopleâs lives, to try to undo damage, that might persuade people. Your plague wonât help.
I used to think that there was no way that we were in a simulation, as I was pretty sure that anything Matrioshka-brain-size that could run a planetary civilization sim would basically be overrun by an aggressive ecosystem of AIs and other numerical entities competing for scarce (to them) computing resources by trying to overwrite each other. Think Corewars: http://www.corewars.org/.
Then I got worried again, because genes are basically doing that (and itâs arguable that memes are as well).
So now I just look for cheat codes.
I wouldnât expect my simulated universe to worship me, any more than Iâd expect my kid to worship me.
But it would be nice if theyâd listen once in a while.
It doesnât really make much difference; whether youâre made out of particles or simulation of particles doesnât change the way they act in practice. But if you entertain the conceit that you donât just arise from the basic physics, but need a special subroutine, death might have to involve some memory being reallocated to other processes. If you really think youâre important, you might hope for some log of what you did.
Most atheists I know are open to correction if you suppose a real proof of some kind, and so would probably say something like what MarjaE said.
But hey, thanks for the needless slur, though. Without hearing that sort of thing from time to time, we might forget how many damn theists hate us for having a different opinion, and then who knows where it will end - people being polite, cats and dogs living together, you name it.
We know at least one thing about the simulation system (from HAKMEM):
âItem 154 (Bill Gosper): The myth that any given programming language is machine independent is easily exploded by computing the sum of powers of 2. If the result loops with period = 1 with sign +, you are on a sign-magnitude machine. If the result loops with period = 1 at -1, you are on a twos-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, including the beginning, you are on a ones-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, not including the beginning, your machine isnât binary - the pattern should tell you the base. If you run out of memory, you are on a string or bignum system. If arithmetic overflow is a fatal error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce machine independence. But the very ability to trap overflow is machine dependent. By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more precisely, algebra: Let X = the sum of many powers of 2 = âŚ111111 (base 2). Now add X to itself: X + X = âŚ111110. Thus, 2X = X - 1, so X = -1. Therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) that is twoâs-complement.â
I suppose you took the âdamnâ more literary than I intended. It was meant as a sarcastic comment. You could easily exchange the âatheistsâ with âdeistsâ as far as I am concerned. I have no problem with either, though fundamentalists strike a nerve with me.
I am not a theist any more than you and certainly donât hate either.
But please feel free to tell me why would the word âdamnâ strike a nerve with you if you are an atheist? You donât believe in God, which is fine, so you wouldnât believe in damnation or paradise. It certainly wouldnât strike mine.
couldnât humans or corporations be the AI in this planet sim?
âYou should suffer for eternityâ is an insult even if you donât think it will happen. But damn has a history of meaning considering something contemptible at least as long as its specific religious meaning. It comes from the Latin damno which means a general condemnation; for instance, people who were really hated would be damnatio memoriae, meaning erased from history. English dictionaries will generally have comparable meanings listed.
Sorry for not picking up on your sarcasm, but itâs easier when you never hear the same thing said with sincerity. Even on these boards you do from time to time.
Sorry but with my limited English knowledge and with my vast Google search knowledge
Define: Damn : (in Christian belief) be condemned by God to suffer eternal punishment in hell.
Speaking contemporary English and having zero clue about Latin, canât know everything. If you have something in Greek though, hit me, I am all in for that.
I suppose some theists could gather all atheists and burn them on the stick, but this is not the damnation I had in mind.
Edit: urban dictionary backs me up! Damn Hollywood movies!!!
All I can say is that in about half an hour, when we take the core behavioral seeds of the plague-decimated SimHumanity and put them back into the Frolicking With Puppies And The Endless Free Ice Cream Doesnât Make You Fat Universe, there will be a brief moment when something that is in some sense you has just enough time to think, âAh, I get it now.â
Even if the world is real, weâre transitory phenomena. Iâd bet on the long-term players being the subject of interest. You donât boil water to look at the bubbles.
And back in the 4th Century B.C., âChung Tzu once dreamed he was a butterfly. When he awoke, he no longer knew if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man or a man who had dreamed he was a butterflyâ (from http://www.pantheism.net/paul/history/chuang-tzu.htm). Dream or simulation, it would appear the question might be the same, if you consider that both are products of the human imagination.
