161–170 of 206 posts
Almost all of the environment we live in is in some way artificial and constructed for our benefit. And that's a good thing.
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No, no, no. I don't have to prove your claim to be wrong. YOU have to prove your claim to be right. You are making extraordinary claims that is at odd with everyday observable lives we live in. If you claims someone was walking on water, its not my job to prove you wrong!
I would very much like to hear the details of these claims I am making, they sound quite exciting! I'd also like to know why the grandparent post has no burden of proof, are certain claims off limits to challenge for some reason, and can that reason be shared publicly?
Original assertion - belief that we are in a simulation with 100% certainty is no different than a religious belief in a deity.
You: "What evidence do you have that there is no evidence though?"
Me: "You cannot claim no evidence is a meaningful assertion here, its not"
> I'd also like to know why the grandparent post has no burden of proof
The OP made no claims. An 'opinion' without an evidence is a belief.
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Much cleaner versions is: Atheism is lack of beliefe in deity due to lack of evidence of any such/any deity. This pushes the burden of proof onto believers.
Strictly speaking, no. There does not have to be any reason to not have a belief, although the one you cite will be common among those who have considered it. And you could still be an atheist even if there was evidence of a deity.
Ummmm,sure maybe proof is a better word than evidence.
But if there was, it would be hard to justify staying atheist.
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Much cleaner versions is: Atheism is lack of beliefe in deity due to lack of evidence of any such/any deity. This pushes the burden of proof onto believers.
This line of thinking is useful for rejecting others who are pushing specific beliefs, but is demonstrably flawed for making conclusions about things that are intrinsically impossible to observe.
Meaning those things don't exist. If a thing makes no interactions with our universe by definition it doesn't exists
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If there's a simulation and we as a species are living in it, and bound by its rules (laws of physics, etc.) then you get into the question of who made said simulation with the rules that constrain us. Since this simulator sysadmin has control over us in ways we cannot comprehend or push back against in a meaningful way, I'd say it counts as a higher power. Since its existence cannot currently be proven false through…
No, the origin beliefs in this case aren't really faith. Let me frame that as questions: do you: - Believe that we will be able to create a true AI, with self-consicousness? - Believe that we will some day have enough energy and compute power to create a simulation that could contains billions of those consciousness? - Believe that if we are able to do so, we will do it (aka no governmental body will prevent a simula…
To believe this with any kind of certainty is no different from believing in deities.
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Such a test wouldn't show we are in a simulation. It would show the universe follows weird rules, which is already what we know from quantum physics.
If you can understand the nature of the simulation and then make and confirm different otherwise surprising and unexplainable experimental predictions consistent with it, this is a good as evidence gets scientifically. Sure there could always be some more complex or unimagined explanation for the same results, but that is reasonable to dismiss with Occam’s razor. If you can’t accept this, you would need to reject all…
If you're in the physical universe, every experimental result, no matter how surprising, simply shows you what a physical universe is like. The physical universe not conforming to expectations is just a psychological problem that presumably comes from being a descendent of apes who survived and evolved when they expected certain things.
If you're in a simulation, you have no idea what to "expect" because you're never seen a physical universe.
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and the next question is "how do I build a device that breaks out of the simulation and lets me interact with the operators" even if, conceptually, it's more likely we are but ants to giants and cannot concieve of the meanings behind their activities.
Is this a rhetorical question formulated by a near-self-aware A.I.?
Or, it could be a subtle call out to Roko's basilisk.
"If they say, maybe you should live your life differently, just from knowing that you might be in a simulation, I respond: I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I have a vague feeling that this discussion predates the 80 or so years we’ve had digital computers! Why not just join the theologians in that earlier discussion, rather than pretending that this is something distinctive about computers? Is it relevantly dif…
Not 100% but you can get a reasonable idea but looking. The God hypothesis seems unlikely for a variety of reasons such as the presence of evil and why there are trillions of stars if it was made for us.
Simulations are normally quite imperfect - you can see the pixels etc. The physics of our universe is hard to simulate - we can't even do one proton reasonably well yet no glitches are seen in physics experiments so that hypothesis seems unlikely too.
Personally I think it's maths. The deeper in physics you go the more it looks like maths. See https://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-... for example.
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If you can understand the nature of the simulation and then make and confirm different otherwise surprising and unexplainable experimental predictions consistent with it, this is a good as evidence gets scientifically. Sure there could always be some more complex or unimagined explanation for the same results, but that is reasonable to dismiss with Occam’s razor. If you can’t accept this, you would need to reject all…
>It’s very different from being able to say before hand “if the universe is simulated using x bit floating point computation, we will get result 1 in this experiment, and if it has infinite precision as we’d expect from a non heuristic physical universe, we would get result 2.” If you're in the physical universe, every experimental result, no matter how surprising, simply shows you what a physical universe is like. T…
I'm not talking about the universe "not conforming to expectations" or being "surprising" as evidence of a simulation, but of our ability to form and test very specific hypotheses, where the outcome is expected to be a certain way due to artifacts of certain types of simulation, thereby providing evidence for it.
This requires a specific hypothesis about the nature of the simulation, and testing a corresponding prediction that we would never have thought to look for, or expected otherwise.
The experimental confirmation of General Relativity by confirming that the perihelion precession of Mercury is almost exactly as predicted, is a good model of what I am talking about. Although the fact of perihelion precession was already known, the magnitude of it could not yet be accurately measured at the time, yet General Relativity was able to precisely predict the magnitude, which was confirmed much later when the measurement became possible.
There are a large number of papers on arXiv outlining paths towards such experiments to test for specific types of simulation artifacts.
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I'm a postdoc in theoretical quantum physics and most of my colleagues believe in MWI which is deterministic
Is MWI falsifiable in any way?
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/30/why-the...