What If Time Really Exists? (2008)

Physicist here. I'd be very careful.. one of the major problems with modern physics, the field and people practicing it, is that they layer explanations with metaphors, and are too quick to embrace mysterious explanations. Much of this stems from the history of quantum mechanics, which was mathematically formalized a generation before intuitive interpretations were worked out by Everett, DeWitt, Bohm, etc. Still to this day physics students are taught "Don't try to make sense of it; humans aren't meant to understand. Just shut up and calculate." by teachers who followed the same advice and knew nothing else.

This is unfortunate as embracing mysteries keeps one from seeking out more fundamental interpretations that actually provide real insight into how things work.

Time and space being an illusion are similar. These notions come from the mathematics which can be formulated in such a way that time and/or space (depending on the theory) are not axiomatic assumptions but rather emergent artifacts of a more fundamental timeless (or rather, time-arrow-less) or spaceless (rather, non-local) formulations. But that's just math. Time and space are as real as anything else. If you doubt that, I have a 23-story window you can walk out of.

Oh now, what nonsense. We're not talking about spontaneously manifesting outside of the "sandbox," we're talking about simulated objects/intelligences comprehending the medium in which they are simulated and then learning to create effects in that medium as if they were working from the outside in.

For example, if you were simulated as a series of electrical signals in a computer, and if you were simulated as having some decision-making capacity, you could decide to take certain actions inside he simulation that might, for example, contextually outside the simulation, change one electrical signal from 'on' to 'off'. Like, "this is the 0 1 switch that represents the aliveness/deadness of SpriteActor32605." If you knew you were in a simulation of this type and you learned how to locate memory addresses, you might be able to execute a rowhammer attack, for example, and gain some sort of user access and more straightforward method to interact with the signals out of which you were made.

I'm not indicating that it would be easy or even that it would be necessarily useful, but particularly if there isn't someone 'monitoring' the simulation (as in, the simulation is the result of randomness and there's nobody trying to eliminate unexpected behavior from the simulated beings), there's every reason to imagine that we could begin to understand and learn to manipulate the medium out of which we were made.

If, you know, we are actually in a simulation and dependent on outside information for continued existence. Which is not settled at all, merely proposed as an explanation for some of the peculiarities we note here.

Bostrom does not define posthuman (so saying "no wiggle room" is ridiculous), so these conclusions about what posthumans understand and do not understand are unjustified and moot. But let me continue:

Bostrom assumes all simulated minds will be "of a similar sort." Another assumption that "minds" are well understood.

Bostrom assumes we will never have the means to glean any information related to whether or not we are in a simulation. Indeed, compared to the unprecedented assumptions needed to admit posthumanity (computers the size of planets, for one!), the assumption that we can determine whether we are in a simulation seems paltry by comparison.

Bostrom's indifference argument is unfounded. In particular, say I only give his proof a 1/N chance of being correct for a very large N. Then by his indifference principle I _still_ must assign an overwhelming probability that I am in a simulation. This doesn't help in that I cannot be 100% certain his argument is wrong since he does not define things rigorously enough for a proof, nor can he possibly do so because of our lack of understanding about human minds or the future of computation. So to be a "rational" being (I hate this term, because it's also undefined), I can't disagree with his argument and conclude the opposite of what he concludes.