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New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

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Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#31

Post by bsenftner »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #2

Oh man, Stephen Wolfram and Jürgen Schmidthuber are probably fuming at the fact that this is called a "new" mathematical framework. It's all very old, and quite conventional, even popular -- not exactly the road not taken. What the author did was use the Physical Church-Turing thesis, and Kleene's second recursion theorem, to show that: (1) If a universe’s dynamics are computable (PCT), and (2) the universe can imple…

Okay, here's the thing: this is creating revenue, this is fascinating literature for a huge class of armchair scientists that want to believe, want to play with these mental toys, and are willing to pay for the ability to fantasize with ideas they are incapable of developing on their own. This is ordinary capitalism, spinning revenues out of sellable stories.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#32

Post by croes »

raverbashing wrote: post #17

We can't even run docker inside docker without making things slower, the simulator hypotheses is frankly ridiculous

You would be living inside docker and wouldn’t know how fast the outside is. Maybe lightspeed is a limit inflicted by the simulation.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#34

Post by Aerroon »

Borg3 wrote: post #21
ericpauley wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also a little silly for the same reasons discussions of theoretical computability often are: time and space requirements. In practice the Universe, even if computable, is so complex that simulating it would require far more compute than physical particles and far more time than remaining until heat death.

Hehe yeah.. For me, its just inverted search for the God. There must be somethink behind it, if its not God, then it must be simulation! Kinda sad, I would expect more from scientist. The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research an…

>The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions...

Isn't that 'just' the laws of nature + the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Life is the ultimate increaser of entropy, because for all the order we create we just create more disorder.

Conway's game of life has very simple rules (laws of nature) and it ends up very complex. The universe doing the same thing with much more complicated rules seems pretty natural.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#35

Post by brap »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

The simulation hypothesis takes something reasonable, that reality is "virtual," and runs it into absurdity. If the universe isn't "real" in the materialist sense, that does not imply that there's a "real" universe outside of the one we perceive, nor does it imply that we're being "simulated" by other intelligences. The path of minimal assumptions from reality not being "real" is idealism. We're not simulated, we're…

I think the underlying assumption is that we are “real”, meaning our existence is grounded in some undisputed “reality”. So if what we perceive as the universe isn’t real, then there has to be some other real universe that is simulating it in some way.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#36

Post by estearum »

Aerroon wrote: post #34
Borg3 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hehe yeah.. For me, its just inverted search for the God. There must be somethink behind it, if its not God, then it must be simulation! Kinda sad, I would expect more from scientist. The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research an…

> The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions... Isn't that 'just' the laws of nature + the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Life is the ultimate increaser of entropy, because for all the order we create we just create…

Yeah, agreed. The actual real riddle is consciousness. Why does it seems some configurations of this matter and energy zap into existence something that actually (allegedly) did not exist in its prior configuration.

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#37

Post by empiricus »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

The simulation hypothesis takes something reasonable, that reality is "virtual," and runs it into absurdity. If the universe isn't "real" in the materialist sense, that does not imply that there's a "real" universe outside of the one we perceive, nor does it imply that we're being "simulated" by other intelligences. The path of minimal assumptions from reality not being "real" is idealism. We're not simulated, we're…

Sorry, I don't understand what you are saying. What do you mean by "something reasonable, that reality is virtual"? In many ways, by definition, reality is what is real not virtual. I have other questions, but this is a good start :)

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#38

Post by mensetmanusman »

Borg3 wrote: post #21
ericpauley wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also a little silly for the same reasons discussions of theoretical computability often are: time and space requirements. In practice the Universe, even if computable, is so complex that simulating it would require far more compute than physical particles and far more time than remaining until heat death.

Hehe yeah.. For me, its just inverted search for the God. There must be somethink behind it, if its not God, then it must be simulation! Kinda sad, I would expect more from scientist. The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research an…

You expect scientists to not ask :‘what is behind all this?’

Ha

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#39

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

estearum wrote: post #36
Aerroon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions... Isn't that 'just' the laws of nature + the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Life is the ultimate increaser of entropy, because for all the order we create we just create…

Yeah, agreed. The actual real riddle is consciousness. Why does it seems some configurations of this matter and energy zap into existence something that actually (allegedly) did not exist in its prior configuration.

I'd argue that it's not that complicated. That if something meets the below five criteria, we must accept that it is conscious:

(1) It maintains a persisting internal model of an environment, updated from ongoing input.

(2) It maintains a persisting internal model of its own body or vehicle as bounded and situated in that environment.

(3) It possesses a memory that binds past and present into a single temporally extended self-model.

(4) It uses these models with self-derived agency to generate and evaluate counterfactuals: Predictions of alternative futures under alternative actions. (i.e. a general predictive function.)

(5) It has control channels through which those evaluations shape its future trajectories in ways that are not trivially reducible to a fixed reflex table.

This would also indicate that Boltzmann Brains are not conscious -- so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann Brains, which would otherwise be very surprising -- and that P-Zombies are impossible by definition. I've been working on a book about this for the past three years...

Re: New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

#40

Post by vasco »

bananaflag wrote: post #24
HPsquared wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no mathematician, but doesn't this come up against Gödel's incompleteness theorem? My brain has that roughly as "If you have a system and a model of that system, but the model is also part of the same system, something something, impossible"

No, this sort of self-reflection is exactly what makes Gödel/Turing/etc impossibility results work ("strange loops" and all that).

Can you explain further?

Maybe I'm too out of this scope but if you want to simulate Universe X plus the computer Y that simulates X then you'd need at least 1 extra bit of memory (likely way more) to encompass the simulation plus the computation running the simulation (X+Y). The computer running the simulation by definition is not part of the simulation, so how can it be that it can truly simulate itself?

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