Are We Living In a Computer Simulation? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?

#21

Post by gojomo » Sat, Jul 05, 2008, 8:55 PM UTC

andr wrote: post #8

From the FAQ: Do you really believe that we are in a computer simulation? No. I believe that the simulation argument is sound.

That he thinks the argument is sound but does not agree with "(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation" means Bostrom believes either:

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; or

(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof).

Re: Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?

#22

Post by zach » Sat, Jul 05, 2008, 9:09 PM UTC

jacobbijani wrote: post #19

What argument would have been made 100 years ago? Are we living in a steam engine?

That we are living in a book. Note that the popular plot device of being trapped in one (or more) books survived intact as being trapped in the TV and being trapped in a virtual reality game.

If you watch kid's cartoon series, you know that this plot device is as inevitable as the Freaky Friday contrivance.

Re: Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?

#23

Post by ericb » Sat, Jul 05, 2008, 9:17 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #15

manny wrote: post #11

man you all really hate this idea. why? I hope its not just because its a thought experiment you guys are afraid to think about. I personally love this thought experiment and the consequences one can reach from it.

It's not that this is shockingly new, it's that it's exceptionally unoriginal. Every 15 year old has done all these thought experiments already. Brain in vat. What happens to personalities when you clone? What happens if you copy a brain on the molecular level - do you get two different people or not? Are you the same person you were 20 years ago? Even though every cell your body has been replaced? It's just psych 10…

What psych 101 class did you take?

Re: Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?

#24

Post by ericb » Sat, Jul 05, 2008, 9:21 PM UTC

a-priori wrote: post #9

avner wrote: post #2

I find the theory full of holes... 1) Just think about the amount of power needed by a system to maintain such a virtual world 2) Consider the magnitude of the power needed to further maintain a nested system/S within itself??? [....besides.. i doubt amazon ec2 could scale this kind of thing anyway \)

That doesn't bother me. Presuppose a fancy, futuristic computer that can handle it, and -- bam -- problem solved. What bothers me is that it's tautological. It's meaningless and banal.

It's no worse than religion, and more likely to be true, from my perspective.

I have trouble understanding how the meaning of our existence or lack thereof is banal.

Re: Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?

#25

Post by rms » Sat, Jul 05, 2008, 9:23 PM UTC

Yes.

Re: Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?

#26

Post by gizmo » Sat, Jul 05, 2008, 9:28 PM UTC

ericb wrote: post #23

gizmo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that this is shockingly new, it's that it's exceptionally unoriginal. Every 15 year old has done all these thought experiments already. Brain in vat. What happens to personalities when you clone? What happens if you copy a brain on the molecular level - do you get two different people or not? Are you the same person you were 20 years ago? Even though every cell your body has been replaced? It's just psych 10…

What psych 101 class did you take?

Philosophy. Not psychology. My bad.

Re: Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?

#27

Post by jsmcgd » Sat, Jul 05, 2008, 10:02 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #15

manny wrote: post #11

man you all really hate this idea. why? I hope its not just because its a thought experiment you guys are afraid to think about. I personally love this thought experiment and the consequences one can reach from it.

It's not that this is shockingly new, it's that it's exceptionally unoriginal. Every 15 year old has done all these thought experiments already. Brain in vat. What happens to personalities when you clone? What happens if you copy a brain on the molecular level - do you get two different people or not? Are you the same person you were 20 years ago? Even though every cell your body has been replaced? It's just psych 10…

What is interesting though is that no matter how unoriginal the question are we still don't have accepted answers, which suggests that it isn't time to stop asking the questions (which is unfortunate for those who are sick of the questions).

Re: Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?

#28

Post by hugh » Sat, Jul 05, 2008, 10:39 PM UTC

gojomo wrote: post #21

andr wrote: post #8

From the FAQ: Do you really believe that we are in a computer simulation? No. I believe that the simulation argument is sound.

That he thinks the argument is sound but does not agree with "(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation" means Bostrom believes either: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; or (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof).

No, he may be entirely agnostic on all three, neither believing nor disbelieving any of them.

That seems like a pretty sensible attitude to have, actually.

Re: Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?

#29

Post by immad » Sat, Jul 05, 2008, 10:44 PM UTC

kaos wrote: post #18

It's just another mind trick, enveloping the whole universe in something that we now understand (discret computer simulations). Anyway, reality is an opinion, so any model is a valid model.

"reality is an opinion"

I like it. Can you explain further?

Re: Are We Living In a Computer Simulation?

#30

Post by hugh » Sat, Jul 05, 2008, 10:49 PM UTC

eyudkowsky wrote: post #20

The Simulation Argument is not that we are living in a computer simulation. It is that you must reject at least one of the 3 propositions: (1) we are not living in a computer simulation (2) the human species will give rise to descendants that have the power to run lots of simulations (3) at least a few of them will run ancestor simulations. Which of these three do you think is untrue? Alternatively you could reject t…

Personally I really doubt (2). I work in theoretical condensed matter physics, and it's awfully hard to accurately simulate anything with more than a very small number of atoms. Sure, computers will continue to get faster for a while, but these problems scale very badly with the size of the system, and we're not all many orders of magnitude away from the fundamental limits of computation. I suspect that even if you were to convert the whole mass of the solar system into one big computer, you probably still couldn't run a decent simulation of any system on the scale of 10^23 atoms.

It's possible you might be able to run a somewhat dodgy simulation which doesn't work on the atomic scale unless it has to (e.g. when your simulated person decides to do some atomic-scale experiments, it would suddenly launch a proper simulation, and otherwise it could get away with a neuron-level simulation). But I still don't think that we'll ever get the computing power needed to make these kinds of simulations trivially easy.