Counter question; would it make any difference?
That’s the point - it wouldn’t. People seem to expect that things would be different or meaningless if we did but I’ve never understood that logic. Even if we do live in the base reality it could just as well be a simulation and nothing would need to change.
Exactly. Even if it was definitely proven that this is all a simulation, there is exactly zero chance humans could ever break out of it or hack or exploit or even begin to understand the machine the simulation is running on. We have still not even figured out the rules for our universe and understanding what the real universe where this is a simulation is way beyond the scope of human understanding. We could not affect it in any meaningful way except maybe some laboratory tests or cause some hideous corruption. Yet we think and feel and experience living in the only way we know. Hence, I’d argue it would not matter.
This is quite literally how many religions view their divine beings. They are so massive that they are beyond your comprehension and we would be powerless to impact them.
Including the Abrahamic religions except people are simple and have rewritten the mindboggling idea “can not comprehend” to punishable dogma “must not mention by name, gaze upon, depict”.
The prohibition is for any graven image not just God. That’s why there aren’t a ton of sculptures of living beings/animals made by Jewish artists in the ancient world.
Except then the same gods are really worried about what you eat, or do with your specific meat-based mammalian reproductive anatomy.
A remote, totally amoral deity a la Lovecraft is at least consistent with facts. Nobody wants to believe in that one, though. You could go polytheist to avoid immediate falsification, too.
The believers would argue that of course these gods have desires but you wouldn’t understand them because you cannot much like the fly in front of me cannot grasp astrophysics.
Yeah. Saying “you just don’t get it and never will” is a great way of defending anything you want. Even if, like in this case, it’s not consistent with the facts. The “it’s a sin to question, so don’t or else” approach has also seen quite a bit of use.
And for some reason, what god is telling us is always convenient for the powerful, and for the dominant culture…
Ignorance is bliss!
Just connect me to my reality.
Then he got wacked by Tony Soprano.
It’s questionable whether it’s even a well-founded question because of this. Like, it depends on your choice of theories about ontology and epistemology. This shows up if you try to do math about it, which I mentioned a bit in my own reply.
50%. We are or we aren’t.
50?! You’re crazy! 0.5 at best!
Just because we do t know something doesn’t masks it 50%
I don’t know if there’s a gorilla in my upstairs bath at the moment but the odds aren’t 50/50
On the question of god or a simulation, they aren’t 50/50 either
- Whoosh
- Given the lack of any meaningful information to base an estimate on, they essentially are.
Same as the odds that a higher being (a god) exists.
Can’t prove it, can’t disprove it. All arguments for it speculative and subjective.
People claim that it is the most likely option because eventually tech will be so advanced that we could make a world simulation, and then we would make multiples, and therefore the probability of this not being a simulation is low.
This claim assumes that computers CAN get that complex (no indication that they could) it also assumes that if they could, we would create world simulators (Why? Parts of it sure, but all of it?) And it assumes that sentient beings inside the simulation could never know it (Why?)
It is as pointless as arguing about god.
This claim assumes that computers CAN get that complex (no indication that they could)
I mean, if you take an existing physics simulation and just scale up the hardware…
I would hope that we wouldn’t build such a thing just out of ethical concerns for the inhabitants, but then again we’ve built a giant AI-training network with very little knowledge of if they have some kind of limited consciousness during the process.
I mean, if you take an existing physics simulation and just scale up the hardware…
Then what? We have no reason to believe that would cause parts of the simulation to be conscious and think they exist in reality.
We’re physics. It seems like we exist.
But we have no evidence that we’re anywhere close to being able to accurately simulate physics, even with planet sizes computers.
We can accurately simulate physics, outside of certain extreme environments. My evidence is that we routinely do, although hardware limitations mean if you want perfect accuracy it’s going to involve just a few particles, with more and more approximation as you scale beyond that.
There are no extreme environments on Earth, by that definition, which is a big part of why physics is stuck on them in the first place. All known life is also on Earth, so that shouldn’t matter, if life and consciousness is what we’re interested in.
We can accurately simulate physics, outside of certain extreme environments
This is not true. For example, we don’t know why [ice is slippery].(https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coldregions.2014.03.002).
Furthermore
There are no extreme environments on Earth…
Yes, there is. Ice. And superconductors. And so on… And even if all the other stuff is exotic, it’s important to know all the other underlying principles to comprehend what’s actually going on.
Yeah, that’s more than a few particles. If you had a planet-sized computer, you could still simulate a block of ice, although it might still be hard to explain in a bird-eye view kind of way why the simulated ice is slippery. Which is what this paper is actually trying to do.
Ditto for superconductors. It’s true that closer to absolute zero something is, the longer quantum features stay relevant, and that imposes a pretty punishing penalty. It’s not infinite, though.
Biggest reason to to a complete simulation would be reversed time dilation. Run the simulation until the civilization is a few hundred to a few thousand years more advanced than your own, and see what technologies they have invented and refined.
I don’t know why people assume that computation power increases indefinitely forever until it simulates a universe. why would it do that?
about 3.50
It was at that moment I realized frankenswine was a 30 story tall monster from the paleolithic era!
A simulation wouldn’t be this stupid
That’s just what the agents want us to think, man!
You telling me you never did absolutely stupid things in sim games?
I figure that we are all definitely living in a simulation because, even if the world has real physical existence, consciousness is essentially a simulation created our brain to make sense of the world.
thanks Baudrillard
There is no connection because consciousness is not fundamentally tied to society (although obviously its contents can be heavily influenced by it).
consciousness is essentially a simulation created our brain
Have you ever been surprised?
surprise is simply the sensation of unexpected information
I have no idea what you are trying to get at by that.
So now you wonder what you need to answer.
There is no sensible definition of probability that makes that question answerable.
Greater than zero.
You wanna tweak your melon a bit? Look up “Last Thursdayism.” It’s a thing — due to the way short term and long term memory work, the theory goes that anything before “last Thursday” is a lie. It’s an arbitrary day of the week. The movie Dark City played off of this, when the — I forget what they were called — did their tuning and rearranged things and swapped peoples’ memories around.
Well, until we see people randomly floating or chunks of the world disappearing, the answer will probably remain “who knows”
People floating would go against the laws of physics of this simulation.
Best way to know if you’re in a simulation is to observe when it glitches (in a way that can’t be explained by a glitch in the sub-simulation that is human perception).
You and several complete strangers see someone floating in the air without any technological support, assuming y’all haven’t been poisoned in a similar way and are hallucinating, either a) there’s some support you don’t know how to look for, b) there’s a condition of reality that hasn’t been accounted for in the study of physics yet, or c) the rule set just straight broke somehow.
I don’t think anyone has totally eliminated glitches in the human or an incomplete understanding of physics to really support a ‘we live in a simulation’ explanation for strange phenomena, at least not yet.
I don’t know.
In reality, simulations would outnumber reality. So that’s the ratio and therefore the chances.
Assuming reality and/or consciousness can be simulated, which we have no way of knowing is true (for now).
I hope so
Also, can somebody please turn it off? I think we took this one as far as it’s worth
I think this depends on how you look at it.
In a certain way, we do live in a fictional world that is constructed of information. If you consider your daily routines, they’re probably following instructions of some sort to earn money, besides other things.
Both of these things - the instructions and the money - are made up. You can see this even more clearly with the money. Money itself is a piece of paper or not even that - a number in a database - that has no real value, yet people believe in it and that belief is what gives it value. In other words, the value of these numbers in databases exists in people’s head more than it does in reality. Now, you could consider this a simulation, because it happens inside a computer and influences what people think.
However, i truly doubt that such a view is meaningful. No matter what is written in the databases, you still have to go through your own, individual life. I feel the biggest question you’re implicitely asking is whether there could exist some kind of cheat code or glitch, like in video games, to shortcut through the world and reach your goals easier. Again, depending on how you look at it, there both are and are not such cheats.
You could consider human technology a sort of cheat. Instead of toiling on the agricultural fields ourselves, we use heavy machinery that is powered by fossil fuels, but more importantly mathematics, to do the work for us. Same goes for all other technologies. As such, the mathematics itself becomes the cheat code.
If a true cheat code would exist in today’s world, you can take solace in the fact that not only you are looking for it, but so is everybody else who has an interest in achieving their goals. Now, you see, the whole economy is simply based on the concept that people want to reach their goals, and to do so, they need resources, for which they need money. So, if a cheat code existed, every single company would have a high interest in finding it and exploiting it. Since the number of people engaged with these desires is quite high, you can assume that significant progress towards that goal is continuously made whenever possible. In fact, people research and invent new things and useful tricks all the time to help us with our daily lifes. If you really wanna know more about this, you should start by studying economics, physics, and society at large. Thank you for your attention, if you have any more questions, let me know :D (i studied philosophy, i might help you)
50 / 50
I want access to the dev console then.
