Thinking about this is a fun little exercise, but I hope nobody becomes a nihilist over it. Because fuck nihilism.
Whats wrong with nihilism?
Is reality a computer simulation? Does it matter?
41–50 of 67 posts
Re: Is reality a computer simulation? Does it matter?
#42There seems to be this background idea here that "If you can't disprove it, that means it's plausible," which is totally mistaken. Not every idea that we can't disprove is worth seriously considering.
Let me put it this way. If a fundamentalist Christian made the same kind of arguments, and said "therefore God probably exists", would you believe that it really was probable? Most likely you'd say "I'm pretty sure that God doesn't exist, even if I can't prove it, and I'm not going to change my view of the probability just because this person says something that sounds good." But if you think that's a reasonable response, why is not the same approach reasonable in response to this "the universe is probably a simulation" stuff?
Re: Is reality a computer simulation? Does it matter?
#43Are you kidding! Of course it matters!! If it's a VM, we can start hacking it, until we find the universal equivalent of a buffer overflow or some kind of edge case branch mispredictoin, and can start injecting our own payload. After a little bootstrapping, and experimentation that hopefully doesn't crash the VM, we are now running whatever physical laws we want. Matrix time!
Or some watchdog system will detect an abnormal behaiour, stop the simulation and report the bug to the developers. They'll fix bugs and run the simulation from the last non-corrupted backup. And we'll never know that someone did that.
Re: Is reality a computer simulation? Does it matter?
#44This idea of a computer simulation is what made me become agnostic. At first I was an atheist, I wasn't believing that any powerful entity would create us like this, a world so complex and coherent, just to test our belief. If I had the capacity to build this kind of computer simulation, I would personally do it in an heartbeat. In fact I'm feel like I'm doing this on some games. I would also consider myself to be th…
Believing in the possibility of a god doesn't exclude you from being an atheist.
Re: Is reality a computer simulation? Does it matter?
#45I think there could be some interesting conclusions or capabilities from being in a simulation.
First, we would expect that the simulation may use heuristics; that some things not "observed" may be simulated in a quicker or more crude way.
Second, there may be a way to access the computational substrate. If the universe exists within a simulation, is there a way to run software directly against the universe "computer"? Are there security vulnerabilities in the simulation that could allow access to the higher level substrate, either to discover more about it or enact otherwise impossible changes in our universe?
Finally, there is the potential for external threat. In a simulation, one time step may take a variable amount of "real" time to complete. If we do find a way to tap into the computational substrate, or otherwise find some actions that burden the simulation excessively, the amount of time each of our universe's timesteps takes to complete in the external host "universe" will increase, possibly to the point where the author of the simulation interventions to correct the problem.
Re: Is reality a computer simulation? Does it matter?
#46"However, Bostrom recognises that a complete emulation of reality on every level is likely to be impractical, even for powerful computing systems."
Doesn't this assume that the simulation is running in a universe where our laws of physics apply? Couldn't what we think of as our laws of physics be a programmed part of the simulation, running on computers in a completely different universe where it's impossible for us to do more than speculate on matters of practicality?
Re: Is reality a computer simulation? Does it matter?
#47Energy, though. I mean, the host universe may have completely different laws of nature, but assuming that the 2nd law exists in it... Organising information (storing it in RAM, carving it on a rock...) decreases entropy and thus takes work (entropy overall increases, because you had to get the energy to do your work by increasing entropy somewhere else by more.) The cost of accurately simulating an entire universe, d…
You assume that our [observable, hypothesized] universe isn't a pittance of matter and energy in a larger universe. Suppose your Conway's Game of Life simulation gained what it considered sentience, and with this sentience contemplated whether this world it inhabits was the universe or a simulation. Now suppose that it deduced that it would take universes of energy to simulate its own universe. Well, it'd be right.
That doesn't mean it's not.
Re: Is reality a computer simulation? Does it matter?
#48Energy, though. I mean, the host universe may have completely different laws of nature, but assuming that the 2nd law exists in it... Organising information (storing it in RAM, carving it on a rock...) decreases entropy and thus takes work (entropy overall increases, because you had to get the energy to do your work by increasing entropy somewhere else by more.) The cost of accurately simulating an entire universe, d…
> At which point, the question becomes, why not just observe the real universe?
I don't think the 'why' is the right question to ponder. It's really a matter of 'if'.
We lack the context to adequately answer 'why' one might decide to create a simulation of a universe. Any(one/thing) capable of putting such a simulation together is about as different from us as we are from bacteria. Therefore, considering motivation is a bit of a dead end.
The 'if' is a question we can at least theorize about. Is a simulated universe possible? If we accept that it is, then we also accept that we are most likely currently in one.
Re: Is reality a computer simulation? Does it matter?
#49There is a very general argument that we can't simulate anything remotely resembling our universe inside our universe: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1220 Short version: at the precision required for the degree of agreement we see between theory and experiment, we could simulate at most 0.5% of our universe, which simulation would not be capable of star formation because there wouldn't be enough matter in it, and a universe "above" ours that was simulating us would collapse immediately after the Big Bang because it would contain at least 200 times as much matter as ours.
The responses to that argument are two-fold:
1) start madly making up increasingly implausible auxiliary assumptions to save the claim that we might be living in a simulation
2) admit that the odds we are living in simulation are rather low, and in particular the argument that we almost certainly are thanks to recursion is extremely poor.
I favour the latter response, as the former seems to involve either claiming that the universe that is simulating us has fundamentally different physics, or that the simulation isn't actually a simulation but rather a game-like approximation that somehow gets updated with sufficient local detail that no matter what kind of experiments we do or observations we happen to make, there is special-case code for ensuring the results look like a consistent underlying physics.
Claiming the universe simulating us has fundamentally different physics requires that we drop any claims about it based on the physics of our universe, in which case it becomes untestable because anything we see may or may not be due to a simulation being run in a universe whose laws are not like our own.
Claiming the approximation is fixed up by special-case code whenever anyone thinks of doing an experiment or making an observation that might reveal the lack of a full physics engine is likewise putting the hypothesis beyond testability.
So either the simulation hypothesis is wrong, or untestable. Neither of these is very interesting.
Re: Is reality a computer simulation? Does it matter?
#50These ideas may be fun to think about, but ultimately they're meaningless. It's certainly not a new idea that some being on another plane of existence brought our universe into being on a whim, and can modify the parameters of its existence at will. If that's so, it's highly unlikely we'll be able to poke any holes in it. Nor is there any reason to believe our memories or any of history is real. Maybe scientists have…
I agree that this premise is very short sighted. Why would a universe of such apparent magnitude be created just so some post-humans could simulate us humans? Who even thinks that? (apparently most simulationists)
In my opinion it's obvious that some intelligent life form decided it would like to create a simulation where life and other interesting behaviour could emerge.
Well, at least I know that I (and many others) would do that if/when we have the means to do so!
Of course, we could never simulate our universe to the same detail and scale (or even close..) within itself. We would have to create a more modest simulation.
So, they could have a highly logical argument for us being in a simulation, but instead they put the words "ancestor simulation" in it. How human of use, once again, thinking the sun spins around the earth!
> Now, how does the "real" world work? Where did it come from? How do we know it isn't a simulation?
That's very easy to answer. Our parent "world" is most likely also a simulation! And so on and forth... ( https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ult... )
Now the real question is.. Who spawned the first simulation? And where the F*CK did they come from.
This wont help our life on the day to day, but why would you say people who think about these subject should take a fresh look at the world? For those who like to think deep, this is the most interesting subject there is.