Does it matter? Think about a simulation in a game on your PC. Nothing in that game actually exists outside the simulation. i.e. as far as anyone/anything in the simulation is concerned, the simulation is real. You cannot leave the simulation. You cannot end the simulation. There's nothing unreal about the simulation for anyone in it.
Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested
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Re: Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested
#32This assumes that reality is simulated using a grid, and particles are either in that cube or that one.
But that's not the only way to run a simulation - you can make the fundamental particles the building pieces and simulate them - they can move anywhere they want, in any direction, they don't live in a grid.
The only thing that matters is their relationship to the particles near them.
Which follows very nicely from relativity which shows that there is no absolute coordinate system, or absolute energy, only relative distances and relative energy differences.
i.e. like the difference between polar coordinates and rectilinear ones.
Re: Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested
#33What would be the purpose of a simulation with so much pain and suffering. Where children get raped, flayed, abused, etc... And don't give me any of that matrix crap, that was only to make a flawed concept make just enough sense that you didn't fully think it through until the next bullet time scene. I'm certainly not on the outside paying for this. I have a degenerative bone disease that's caused me to have 6 major…
That question is answered by theodicy- the philosophical field of justifying God's dealings with the universe. I recommend C.S. Lewis's _The Problem of Pain_. The short version is that if you give people free will, then there is a risk that they will try to hurt each other; if you always intervene to ensure that they can't hurt each other, then their free will is worthless; and if they don't have free will, then what's the point of them living?
Now as I said, that's the short version, and in such drastically abbreviated form the argument has holes you could drive a humvee through. An alternate explanation is that the creators of the simulation simply don't care about us at all, and we and our problems have nothing to do with its purpose. One might also ask, if the creators do care about us after all, why didn't they just make everyone morally perfect so they wouldn't freely hurt each other? In which case me-with-my-theologian-hat would say "maybe a life of pain is the very process by which morally perfect people are created". But theodicy is a very large field which I cannot adequately summarize in this post, so if you want real answers, just start with that book.
Re: Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested
#34Does it matter? Think about a simulation in a game on your PC. Nothing in that game actually exists outside the simulation. i.e. as far as anyone/anything in the simulation is concerned, the simulation is real. You cannot leave the simulation. You cannot end the simulation. There's nothing unreal about the simulation for anyone in it.
It does. If the simulation is buggy, we could hack it and "get out of the box" :). See also:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/
Re: Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested
#35Does it matter? Think about a simulation in a game on your PC. Nothing in that game actually exists outside the simulation. i.e. as far as anyone/anything in the simulation is concerned, the simulation is real. You cannot leave the simulation. You cannot end the simulation. There's nothing unreal about the simulation for anyone in it.
> You cannot leave the simulation.
At any level of simulation we know that when we take time, it takes time in the reality that hosts us too. It's nice to know we'll always have that in common.
Re: Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested
#36This assumes that reality is simulated using a grid, and particles are either in that cube or that one. But that's not the only way to run a simulation - you can make the fundamental particles the building pieces and simulate them - they can move anywhere they want, in any direction, they don't live in a grid. The only thing that matters is their relationship to the particles near them. Which follows very nicely from…
Also the simulation doesn't really even have to involve particles. Stephen Wolfram did some interesting writing on concept of our reality / laws of physics emerging from simple computational systems like cellular automaton [0]. Also Eliezer had some interesting points about how a continous interpretation of causal networks gives rise to some concepts we recognize from physics, like space, time and the speed of light binding them together [1].
Re: Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested
#37No it can't. The simulation hypothesis will never be testable. All our assumptions about the hypothetical computers our universe runs on are based on things as they are in this universe. We have no basis at all for applying these assumptions to the host universe. We don't know if the simulation runs on a discrete computer, a finite computer, or whether it resembles a Turing machine in any way. We don't know what kind of physical limits there are on computation, or to what extent those are even recognizable concepts, and that's just a few highlights. We have no idea what it might be like up there, or what can be done.
And don't tell me about "likely", you have no data worth mentioning, in particular about "likely" physics or "likely" motivations of simulators.
Re: Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested
#38Why do smart people love to debate the most implausible
nonsense? Time travel through singularities anyone?
Re: Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested
#39What would be the purpose of a simulation with so much pain and suffering. Where children get raped, flayed, abused, etc... And don't give me any of that matrix crap, that was only to make a flawed concept make just enough sense that you didn't fully think it through until the next bullet time scene. I'm certainly not on the outside paying for this. I have a degenerative bone disease that's caused me to have 6 major…
That question is answered by theodicy- the philosophical field of justifying God's dealings with the universe. I recommend C.S. Lewis's _The Problem of Pain_. The short version is that if you give people free will, then there is a risk that they will try to hurt each other; if you always intervene to ensure that they can't hurt each other, then their free will is worthless; and if they don't have free will, then what…
I sometimes envisage the simulation as the random by-product of some other computation. That we exist in the noise, the margins of some extremely large (maybe "game-of-life"-like) computation. The runners of the computer computation don't know what is happening at our level, they just see the underlying binary representation and the eventual result. There can be a large stack of emergent patterns, from the bottom-most jumbling of zeros and ones to quarks and eventually atoms and molecules. Even if they are looking at molecular level they would have no idea that anything alive and conscious and suffering is in there. Just funny moving patterns! How could they recognize a completely alien ecology running at arbitrary speed?
A somewhat scary thought.
Re: Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested
#40The mystery between DMT and brain chemistry is also a valid area to understand such an idea. DMT is a naturally occurring substance that's in the human body, animals and various plants. The mystery is that it is almost identical to serotonin and tryptophan. But it is not like any other drug. It's almost unfair to call it a drug. Under its effects, reality looks radically different. You can see the math and inherent a…
Ketamine too.