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Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

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Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#141

Post by kobeya »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #68
moxious wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be the case that we are being simulated by a far superior alien species. It could also be that invisible pink unicorns in the 15th dimension control all of our thoughts and only want us to believe this. Without being tongue in cheek, I'll observe that the empirical evidence for both of these ideas is equal in quantity. We don't know for sure that these things aren't true. But to ask that question is to inapp…

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 result is ultimately empty and meaningless.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#143

Post by Geee »

My hypothesis is that we are in a natural simulation, i.e. simulated by a computer which evolved by itself. Or layers of simulations. The "base universe" should be the simplest possible universe that is very simple, but capable of evolving the first simulation, which is more complex universe.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#144

Post by caf »

teraflop wrote: post #54
AnonNo15 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can answer the "why" question. Provided, our descendants will be able to empathize with their ancestors (rather big "if"), they can use the simulation to reverse the death and resurrect every person who ever lived. As for verifying the accuracy of the simulation, you only need information about the initial state of the universe (think CMB radiation) and partial information about past states of the universe to repro…

You're using words like "only", "partial" and "a selected region" but you're still talking about staggering amounts of information, on any humanly achievable scale. A single human body contains on the order of 10^27 atoms. If you just wanted to record the state of someone's mind, with sufficient fidelity to be worthy of the term "resurrection", you could probably get away with a coarser granularity. But you're talkin…

Regarding your last point, it is my understanding that in fact the laws of physics are entirely time-reversible in a mathematical sense, and that what thermodynamics does on top of that is say "in reality, time runs only in this direction".

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#145

Post by frobozz »

GuiA wrote: post #125
Ntrails wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's evidence that your brain is influenced by e.g. certain chemicals in your bloodstream produced by gut bacteria. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/gut-bacte... So the brain in a jar model where the only interface with the real world is through nerves is most probably wrong; now your jar also needs a stomach with a fully developed microbial ecosystem. And that's just one recent mechanism that wa…

No, at most you can say it requires a way to introduce those chemicals into the bloodstream in the brain.

Actually, all you need is a way to stimulate the same receptors that are stimulated by those chemicals.

Just as with unit testing, you don't actually need to hook up your SUT to a real environment, you just need to hook it up to something that will exercise the same interface as a real environment.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#146

Post by platz »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #89

Something that most people never consider in these discussions: If you accept the hypothesis that mind is generated by a computation, and that this computation is finite, then the same computation that produces "you" can be performed in different places and at different times. The same computation can be performed inside a simulation, inside a simulation inside a simulation and so on. Whatever environment around you…

> If the universe is infinite in some sense, this probability converges to 1.

Limits that extend to infinity don't have to converge to 1.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#147

Post by andyjohnson0 »

AnonNo15 wrote: post #18
snowwrestler wrote: post #6

Here's what I wrote in a comment here last year about the Bostrom simulation argument specifically: The simulation argument, going back to Bostrom, relies on two flaws. 1) It leverages our optimism to corrupt our understanding of statistics and logic. It essentially says that if you think humanity doesn't destroy itself, then our descendants will probably try to simulate us. But of course if you just take a statistic…

Regarding you second point - you don't need to simulate the Universe at 1:1 scale to reliably replicate the past states of a certain region. For example, Earth itself can be simulated at full resolution only within a thin shell centered on it's surface, say +/-10 km from geoid. There are no observers at the core, so a simplified model would do, as long as plate tectonics is reproduced accurately enough.

A short story by Stephen Baxter, Touching Centauri, touches on this issue of model resulution and observers. [Spoilers ahead]

The protagonists use a powerful laser to bounce a pulse of energy off an exoplanet. This forces the entities who (it emerges) are simulating the universe (or maybe just our local portion of it) to massively increase the accuracy and extent of the simulation, so that the returned pulse behaves as physically expected. Previously they had been simulating the remote star system in a low resolution way due to the lack of observers there. The sudden need to increase the simulation's extent and resolution overwhelms their computational resources and the simulation crashes. A resource exhaustion attack on "reality", in other words.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#148

Post by [deleted] »

kobeya wrote: post #141
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#149

Post by bryanrasmussen »

julianpye wrote: post #121
jonathanstrange wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a non-sequitur you have there, because you do not even attempt to explain why there should be a case distinction. To be fair, even Nick Bostrom's original simulation argument is also based on several fairly unfounded and not very plausible assumptions (e.g. what extremely advanced societies would do). Much of the debate seems to be based on speculation.

Well, my blog-post is half-serious. The bigger question from it would be why the hell the Universe would be implemented in Java :)

Well if you do it in Basic a pony takes 4 million lines.

Re: Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation

#150

Post by naasking »

moxious wrote: post #28
planetjones wrote: post #24

But couldn't our universe be being simulated by a species far more advanced and discrete to anything the human race has ever encountered? How do we know that another form of life doesn't find everything that we find super complex extremely trivial ?

It could be the case that we are being simulated by a far superior alien species. It could also be that invisible pink unicorns in the 15th dimension control all of our thoughts and only want us to believe this. Without being tongue in cheek, I'll observe that the empirical evidence for both of these ideas is equal in quantity. We don't know for sure that these things aren't true. But to ask that question is to inapp…

> It could be the case that we are being simulated by a far superior alien species. It could also be that invisible pink unicorns in the 15th dimension control all of our thoughts and only want us to believe this.

Either could be true, but they are not equally likely to be true. This is a common but fallacious argument against simulations.

The fact is, the simulation argument is ultimately pretty reasonable, and follows a chain of logic grounded in widely accepted empirical facts.

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