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Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

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Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#111

Post by KCFforecast »

How to solve any problem quickly: Program your computer to solve a problem in a million years time, then go for a travel at the speed of light, come back to your home and consult the solution of your problem, you have been traveling only a few days but your computer has been doing computation a million of years, so you now have the solution, a quick one.

Just alter that system to use the relative time to have computer working millions of years to solve problems for you and you can have the solution in days. Call it photon computation to give the system a name.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#113

Post by [deleted] »

GuiA wrote: post #107
TelmoMenezes wrote: post #89

Something that most people never consider in these discussions: If you accept the hypothesis that mind is generated by a computation, and that this computation is finite, then the same computation that produces "you" can be performed in different places and at different times. The same computation can be performed inside a simulation, inside a simulation inside a simulation and so on. Whatever environment around you…

Except that your mind is not an isolatable computation - it is influenced by your body, which is in turn influenced by its immediate environment, in turn influenced by the rest of the universe in an ever expanding nested fashion. So if you want to simulate yourself, you have to simulate the universe.

[deleted]

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#114

Post by mrleiter »

Immanuel Kant foresaw all this. In his seminal work "Critique of pure reason" he argues that our pure reason, as opposed to the pure mind, always tries to look for the absolute, the absolute of all conditionals. This leads our reason to look beyond empirically observable objects. Those objects that have their origin only in pure reason is what he calls "ideas". Those ideas can be separated into three categories, namely psychologia rationalis (Soul), cosmologia rationalis (World) and theologie transcendentaus (God, or Being of all Beings).

Ideas can never be proven or falsified for that matter. But they have their use: be a guideline for our living. This is where Kant's famous practical philosophy stems from.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#115

Post by Ntrails »

GuiA wrote: post #107
TelmoMenezes wrote: post #89

Something that most people never consider in these discussions: If you accept the hypothesis that mind is generated by a computation, and that this computation is finite, then the same computation that produces "you" can be performed in different places and at different times. The same computation can be performed inside a simulation, inside a simulation inside a simulation and so on. Whatever environment around you…

Except that your mind is not an isolatable computation - it is influenced by your body, which is in turn influenced by its immediate environment, in turn influenced by the rest of the universe in an ever expanding nested fashion. So if you want to simulate yourself, you have to simulate the universe.

> So if you want to simulate yourself, you have to simulate the universe.

This doesn't gel with me. I go back to brain in a jar stuff - I'm just streaming packets of data from nerves and processing them. Whether the "body" I'm responding to is real is pretty hard to guarentee.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#116

Post by xelxebar »

joeyspn wrote: post #56
planetjones wrote: post #24

But couldn't our universe be being simulated by a species far more advanced and discrete to anything the human race has ever encountered? How do we know that another form of life doesn't find everything that we find super complex extremely trivial ?

Exactly. Trying to discern wether we live in a simulation or not with our current knowledge of physics and the universe (we are idiots that only recently discarded geocentrism), is like monkeys trying to guess if the zoo they live in is human-made or part of the nature... it is beyond the comprehension of the species... It all boils down to wether you think a superintelligent civilisation with superior understanding…

Though a perhaps interesting reworking of the question could be "If the universe were a simluation, what can we say about the computational machine doing the simulation?" I'm guessing that Complexity Theory has some stuff to talk about here.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#117

Post by ClassyJacket »

jcbrand wrote: post #73
MrQuincle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might help on an existential level. + In the space of all possible universes it is unlikely that we live in the most probable one, but it is likely that we live in a probable one. + When I feel existentially lost, I'd like to think that if we look deep into math we will see the necessity of our universe's existence. + Our universe is a probable sequence hidden like primes within natural numbers. It exists forever,…

> In the space of all possible universes it is unlikely that we live in the most probable one, but it is likely that we live in a probable one. I was never great at probability theory, but wouldn't we by definition most likely be living in the most probable universe?

Nope. Imagine there are million possible universes. Imagine the most probable has a probability of 1%. It'd still pretty unlikely that we live in that one, even tho it's more likely than any other one.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#118

Post by KCFforecast »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #89

Something that most people never consider in these discussions: If you accept the hypothesis that mind is generated by a computation, and that this computation is finite, then the same computation that produces "you" can be performed in different places and at different times. The same computation can be performed inside a simulation, inside a simulation inside a simulation and so on. Whatever environment around you…

I think that you can have a cheap copy of yourself if you only simulate the main factors. The problem is now to know have sensible is the system to perturbations and how to control deviations. It seems that our genes and body are programmed to recover and repair, in such a way that for example all those bad mutated cells are eliminated and we survive for 80 years. Like a flame, the laws of the university generate stable system like life.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#119

Post by jfries »

Aeolun wrote: post #103

I recently read a short story about this exact subject: https://qntm.org/responsibility I think it quite accurately represents the mind-fuck that this causes.

Wow that's quite a thought experiment. Fun twist at the end, I wonder how society would react to this realization.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#120

Post by StavrosK »

KCFforecast wrote: post #111

How to solve any problem quickly: Program your computer to solve a problem in a million years time, then go for a travel at the speed of light, come back to your home and consult the solution of your problem, you have been traveling only a few days but your computer has been doing computation a million of years, so you now have the solution, a quick one. Just alter that system to use the relative time to have compute…

That's not "quickly". That's your consciousness slowing down to a rate of one day per million years.
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