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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

#121

Post by julianpye »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #110
julianpye wrote: post #105

Regarding AI and God and religion - here is a blog post that I wrote that suggests that being in a simulation actually increases our chances for a religious afterlife. https://medium.com/@photodiary/implementing-religion-in-ai-l...

That's a non-sequitur you have there, because you do not even attempt to explain why there should be a case distinction. To be fair, even Nick Bostrom's original simulation argument is also based on several fairly unfounded and not very plausible assumptions (e.g. what extremely advanced societies would do). Much of the debate seems to be based on speculation.

Well, my blog-post is half-serious. The bigger question from it would be why the hell the Universe would be implemented in Java :)

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

#122

Post by jonathanstrange »

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…

Bostrom's argument is based on rather implausible and far-fetched assumptions, e.g. speculation about what advanced civilizations would do or not.

There are more interesting variants of the simulation argument and many types of simulations could be detectable. To give an example of what makes the question principally interesting, one could claim that storing an infinite amount of information within a finite amount of space violates the laws of thermodynamics and is therefore not physically possible. Hence, real numbers don't exist and the universe is discrete. If it is also finite, then you can simulate it on a computer.

What I'm saying is that even though the question whether we are in a simulation is mostly speculation, there are some principally interesting corollaries about it, and some of them are physically meaningful in the sense that they can be confirmed or falsified by experiments at least in principle.

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

#123

Post by boomboomsubban »

Insanity wrote: post #86

I am not sure what to make of the whole universe-is-a-simulation argument. The problem is that, this is as far as I know, not an hypothesis we could ever hope to prove. Not any more than we can proof that a diety exists outside of this world. I highly doubt that there is a higher creature, whether that would be a God of some kind, or a whole civilization outside of our universe that somehow simulates us. But let's fo…

>Would that not immediatly raise the question "why"? If we are a simulation I would really like to know the reason for being simulated. What do they hope to reach with simulating a life like ours?

It's the holy grail of the scientific method. Anything becomes testable and observable, the "why" seems obvious.

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

#124

Post by KCFforecast »

StavrosK wrote: post #120
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.

You don't solve the problem by yourself, that problem is solved for you on system A, in system A a million years have lapsed but in your life only a few days have passed.

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

#125

Post by GuiA »

Ntrails wrote: post #115
GuiA wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's evidence that your brain is influenced by e.g. certain chemicals in your bloodstream produced by gut bacteria.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/gut-bacte...

So the brain in a jar model where the only interface with the real world is through nerves is most probably wrong; now your jar also needs a stomach with a fully developed microbial ecosystem. And that's just one recent mechanism that was investigated; there are probably many others.

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

#126

Post by evanb »

julianpye wrote: post #121
jonathanstrange wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a non-sequitur you have there, because you do not even attempt to explain why there should be a case distinction. To be fair, even Nick Bostrom's original simulation argument is also based on several fairly unfounded and not very plausible assumptions (e.g. what extremely advanced societies would do). Much of the debate seems to be based on speculation.

Well, my blog-post is half-serious. The bigger question from it would be why the hell the Universe would be implemented in Java :)

Honestly, we hacked most of it together with perl. https://www.xkcd.com/224/

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

#127

Post by Insanity »

simonh wrote: post #100
Insanity wrote: post #86

I am not sure what to make of the whole universe-is-a-simulation argument. The problem is that, this is as far as I know, not an hypothesis we could ever hope to prove. Not any more than we can proof that a diety exists outside of this world. I highly doubt that there is a higher creature, whether that would be a God of some kind, or a whole civilization outside of our universe that somehow simulates us. But let's fo…

I think it's interesting to speculate what the simulation argument means for religion. The existence of a simulation creator doesn't actually disprove the existence of an ultimate god, after all the beings running the simulation might have a divine creator, so it just pushes the question up a level. But it does pose a problem for imminent religions that believe that god intervenes in the world to cause miracles. How…

More problematic than it already is. But should we perhaps see these sysadmins as 'divine sysadmins'. In essence, they could fulfill the job that our God today does (not do).

But here we once again hit the problem that it would be incredibly hard to prove, if not impossible. So I don't think religion has something immediate to fear. Maybe some people will start taking it 'on faith' that there are divine sysadmins interfering with our lives, whilst others take it on faith that there is a God interfering with our lives.

Since religion seems to not be constrained by 'logic' as much, they could probably find a way around it.

Going with the idea of a God one level higher does raise some other problems in my opinion. First of all, if there is a God one level up, then that means that we have no idea what that God would be like, invalidating all religions of today. Or, one would argue, that the ones creating our simulation have given us the word of _their_ God. Which would mean that either there is one true God, given to us by the supreme programmers. Thus the other Gods we have are wrong and are an invention from within our simulation, but it's impossible to find out which one the correct one is (or was, maybe it was Zeus and our simulation denied that). Alternatively, maybe they have many Gods and they added all their Gods to our simulation and instead of accepting all of them, we refused to do that...

I don't think a convincing argument can be given for any of the scenarios.

Though, it's something interesting to think about!

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

#128

Post by yk »

Putnam has a very nice argument in his Brains in a vat paper. [1] Basically he argues that a brain in a box lacks any causal connection to the box, the brain does never learn any information about the box. The idea "I am a brain in a box" lacks a reference and any reasoning about it is at best a lucky guess, even if true.

The issue is the similar, but more fundamental, as me claiming "you have a misplaced comma in the second sentence of your next email." That may or may not be true, but if it is true it is certainly not based on sound reasoning.

[1] http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_2908.pdf

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

#129

Post by wruza »

landryraccoon wrote: post #64
leni536 wrote: post #26

The statement "we live in a simulation" is not falsifiable. For me this question is simply not interesting.

Maybe it is if there's a bug in the simulation. Large scale software projects have bugs all the time.

Maybe we asked too few questions for now and the quantum system is not overconstrained enough for us to see any bugs.

Maybe it is not software, but natural process when our physics was separated from original physics (the event that happened at the big bang) and all this is a temporary false state.

Maybe our gods are not aware of us and our universe is a single pew in their high-tech starwars.

The fact is, all these possibilities are close to our minds, so we find them 'interesting', but there could be billions of billions other not so close-to-mind ideas that are much less sci-fi and do not fit the religion happiness/meaningfulness property. That's why falsifiability is important — you can't connect real point to one of infinite amount of imagined points and pretend that road exists. We explore the universe, we do not imagine things so they suddenly realize. Imagination is a property of our simple and biased minds. Nature doesn't give a fuck about what you like.

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

#130

Post by Insanity »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #123
Insanity wrote: post #86

I am not sure what to make of the whole universe-is-a-simulation argument. The problem is that, this is as far as I know, not an hypothesis we could ever hope to prove. Not any more than we can proof that a diety exists outside of this world. I highly doubt that there is a higher creature, whether that would be a God of some kind, or a whole civilization outside of our universe that somehow simulates us. But let's fo…

>Would that not immediatly raise the question "why"? If we are a simulation I would really like to know the reason for being simulated. What do they hope to reach with simulating a life like ours? It's the holy grail of the scientific method. Anything becomes testable and observable, the "why" seems obvious.

But what precisely are they testing? Which hypothesis of theirs? It does of course seem obvious that thay simulate it to test _something_.

To me, that does not really satisfy the "Why" question, though to a certain degree it does answer it, albeit without being specific.

It's akin to asking someone "Why do you need a particle collider?" -> "To test something". I assume you'd like to know what they are testing :-)

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