91–100 of 211 posts
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On the plus side, programming is about to become much more interesting for you!
From running virtual machines to running virtual universes. Same job, more work.
Time Cube! These stupid idiots still don't understand it.
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Are they using a pseudo-random number generator with a set seed, or is there a better source of randomness? ;) I treat free will as an assumption: - If we are, in fact, predestined, assuming I have free will doesn't hurt or matter. - If we do have free will, I'm applying that free will to make decisions based on a correct assumption - If we do have free will and I had assumed we were predestined, this could have wors…
"If we are, in fact, predestined, assuming I have free will doesn't hurt or matter." Not to mention you were predestined to assume so.
If you're interested in going a bit deeper on this, Nick Bostrom ( http://nickbostrom.com/ ) has pulled together an intriguing case: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html A provoking question: if we found evidence that convinced us, beyond a reasonable doubt, that we were living in a computer simulation, would you change your behavior?
Bostrom's postulates are exceedingly bad. His assumptions rely to much on the isotropy of properties of the one "real" existence and the simulated ones. I would expect, statistically, that there would be far more universes simulated that have properties that are nothing like the "real" one as technology progresses, i.e. there are more instances of "sonic the hedgehogs" and "super mario brothers 1" over the more "real…
What 'postulates' would they be calculated from? Does it even make sense to speak of universes following different 'logics'?
> far more universes simulated that have properties that are nothing like the "real" one as technology progresses, i.e. there are more instances of "sonic the hedgehogs" and "super mario brothers 1"
Those seem like perfectly normal universes to me: they're fully describable by short programs executing over discrete binary states like a chunk of RAM. Where's the violation of logic or metaphysical oddities there?
"The theory basically goes that any civilisation which could evolve to a 'post-human' stage would almost certainly learn to run simulations on the scale of a universe. And that given the size of reality - billions of worlds, around billions of suns - it is fairly likely that if this is possible, it has already happened." That sounds distinctly like Anselm's ontological proof for the existence of God, and thus likely…
Pretty sure under our current understanding of physics, it's impossible to simulate a universe like our own within our own.
And if it has? Well, then the statistical likelihood is that we're located somewhere in that chain of simulations within simulations. The alternative - that we're the first civilisation, in the first universe - is virtually (no pun intended) absurd. wrong. there are multiple alternatives; we are the nth civilization in a real universe, we are the nth to the nth civilization in the multiverse, etc. Sloppy sensationali…
I've always felt there's something deeply fallacious -- or hopelessly wrapped up in human psychology -- about taking a representation of a virtual world that we might create and treating it as on par with the actual universe. It's almost like saying "we're probably characters in a novel," since for every universe there are many novels. Or like that old proof that God exists because he has every desirable quality, inc…
The bottom line is that we just don't know, and are unlikely ever to know, but if one wants to argue intelligently about it, there's a huge amount of philosophical literature on just this topic.
On the other hand, your position would seem to deny human rights to future intelligent robots, which has serious ethical ramifications should you happen to be wrong.
I think it's a bit silly to try to infer things about the computer that could be simulating our universe based on things internal to the simulation. Many of our fictions don't have the same laws of physics as we do.
Therefore, our universe would be a reasonable facsimile of there's in most respects.
Which has the implication that their may be limitations on their computational substrates which required workarounds or optimizations, or as the lattice QCD case points out - which require representing phenomenoma as discrete computational steps, rather then continuous analytical functions. It's a well known problem in all the computational disciplines, that changing the time-step of your simulation frequently leads to wildly different results then you expect.
Think about the speed of light and tell me how it makes _any_ sense that time slows down due to velocity. Yet that's exactly what EVE Online does to stop nodes crashing during heavy gameplay.
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"If we are, in fact, predestined, assuming I have free will doesn't hurt or matter." Not to mention you were predestined to assume so.
You have to live as if you have free will. You can't say, "I've considered all the possibilites, and have decided that there is no free will", because considerations and decisions are acts of free will themselves. Of course, that doesn't mean you have free will.