171–180 of 285 posts
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Popper's concept of "falsifiable" claims as the only means to science has been debunked time and again. It's not how real science works most of the time.
Really? I'm interested in reading more about this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method
(And other newer sources on epistemology, but those are basic).
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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.
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The meaningful version of the question "am I in a simulation?" is "how likely am I to observe meddling from simulation masters, as opposed to observing business as usual according to the laws of physics?" The only reasonable answer seems to be "very unlikely, because I haven't observed such meddling before". That reasoning depends only on induction, so it works regardless of how many copies of me exist. (BTW, I'm pre…
There is nothing to distinguish meddling from "that's just how the universe works. Time to update the Standard Model."
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…
Why can't this be proven? Make no mistake, I'm not well versed on arguments for God, though it has been attempted in the past to prove with logic that a God or God-like being must exist. Are you saying that such arguments are always fallacious? Or only the ones you've seen?
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> 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.
Assuming nerves "stream data" and neurons "process data". Also, who is the you that is doing this streaming and processing?
Think of it this way. When you type something to google, what is the "Google" that is answering your question? "Where" is it?
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There are many questions in life that are interesting to consider, independent of whether they're falsifiable. It tends to get boring to consider only questions that can be experimentally proven, though different people have different interests. Questions about society and human nature are worth considering, for example, but it's difficult to do controlled experiments. There's some truth to "watch out for wishful thi…
> There are many questions in life that are interesting to consider, independent of whether they're falsifiable. It tends to get boring to consider only questions that can be experimentally proven... You say "boring", I say "ruthlessly pragmatic." It could be argued, crudely, that the non-verifiable questions are akin to epistomatic masturbation. We are drawn to them, and debating them makes us feel good, but the res…
Did you mean "epistemic"? I don't know of any kind of masturbation that involves stomata only on the upper side of a leaf.
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There are many questions in life that are interesting to consider, independent of whether they're falsifiable. It tends to get boring to consider only questions that can be experimentally proven, though different people have different interests. Questions about society and human nature are worth considering, for example, but it's difficult to do controlled experiments. There's some truth to "watch out for wishful thi…
> There are many questions in life that are interesting to consider, independent of whether they're falsifiable. It tends to get boring to consider only questions that can be experimentally proven... You say "boring", I say "ruthlessly pragmatic." It could be argued, crudely, that the non-verifiable questions are akin to epistomatic masturbation. We are drawn to them, and debating them makes us feel good, but the res…
Did you mean "epistemic"? I don't know of any kind of masturbation that involves stomata only on the upper side of a leaf.
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If you're frustrated that it's opaque, and you care about understand the chance to do so is as near as googling "Kant absolute of all conditionals".
If you don't care about understanding, why complain?
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There are many questions in life that are interesting to consider, independent of whether they're falsifiable. It tends to get boring to consider only questions that can be experimentally proven, though different people have different interests. Questions about society and human nature are worth considering, for example, but it's difficult to do controlled experiments. There's some truth to "watch out for wishful thi…
The part where "is this a simulation" becomes an uninteresting question is when you ask "Does it matter?". Would answering the question of whether we're in a simulation have any impact on your behavior, thoughts, and actions? Probably not. So what does it matter? My high school physics teacher once said that, if we ever find something that is outside the universe, then we will obviously be smart enough to call that t…
It would matter a lot, surely.
Being in a simulation, implies that some conscious entity is running the simulation and has constructed it.
Therefore, the motivations and reason of that being running the simulation are immediately important.
Perhaps a twisted posthuman sect is running an ancestor simulation of all humans to have existed to "test" them in various moral situations and then judge them or punish them as appropriate? That could be hugely important for how you choose to live your life.
Even if you don't know why a simulation is being run, but only know that you are in one, it raises a lot of troubling questions because the simulation runner must have some motivation. I bet it would lead people to live differently.
The universe would go from being fundamentally amoral to having an effectively omnipotent entity in "charge" of it - a massive change that would surely influence how people view things and act.